openAdmin
07-31-2009, 04:19 AM
Carla Schroder's blog “Why Code For Free? Linux/FOSS Devs Speak!” in linuxplanet.com is a three part read that tries to get answers straight from the horse’s mouth. So why do they do it?
Akkana Peck is a popular LinuxPlanet author who writes programming-for-beginners and Gimp howtos, is the author of "Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional", and is along-time open source developer. She was asked:
How can a dev make a living writing Free software?
“By working for a company that pays people to develop free software. There are lots of such companies for kernel developers, especially those who specialize in network and storage, but there are also companies paying people to develop other open source products -- Mozilla, Canonical, Redhat, Novell, Oracle and a number of smaller companies. And there are a lot of university people writing open source software as part (probably not all) of their jobs. I'd like to see government jobs doing that as well, but there don't seem to be many.”
Why should anyone code for free? Especially when they're seasoned professionals, and not noobs looking for experience?
Scratch an itch: create programs that do something you need, the way you wish they'd do them.
Chance to write the sort of code YOU want to write, not what your boss wants you to write or some committee says you should write.
Chance to learn new technologies, either because you find them exciting or as resume-building material you can't get through your job.
Chance to use a language you like better than the one they use at work.
Fame and glory. Okay, that's flippant, but it really is a chance to get your name on something that's useful to a lot of people, which a lot of programmers don't get from work (a lot of programming jobs involve writing little one-off stuff few people will ever see, internal websites, business apps, etc.)
Chance to get known in a community as a good developer, so you can eventually get paid for working on that or similar projects.
That last one is especially important for anyone trying to break into programming jobs: students, career changers, people with the wrong sort of connections who got stuck in a dead-end job instead of real programming.
Another developer, Daniel Pittman says:
A huge range of reasons, but the biggest one for me is education My job doesn't pay for spending an hour or more each day learning, but keeping up with the industry requires it. Working on FOSS means that I can play with new and exciting things that are different to what I have used before, or that are speculative and edge things that /might/ be useful at
work. Keeping up, in turn, means that I keep being a desirable hire in the industry, so helps keep me in the style to which I have become accustomed. ;)
What does a person get out of writing Free software?
Experience, community, and a sense of achievement.
For the full article, visit linuxplanet.com (http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/6807/1/)
Akkana Peck is a popular LinuxPlanet author who writes programming-for-beginners and Gimp howtos, is the author of "Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional", and is along-time open source developer. She was asked:
How can a dev make a living writing Free software?
“By working for a company that pays people to develop free software. There are lots of such companies for kernel developers, especially those who specialize in network and storage, but there are also companies paying people to develop other open source products -- Mozilla, Canonical, Redhat, Novell, Oracle and a number of smaller companies. And there are a lot of university people writing open source software as part (probably not all) of their jobs. I'd like to see government jobs doing that as well, but there don't seem to be many.”
Why should anyone code for free? Especially when they're seasoned professionals, and not noobs looking for experience?
Scratch an itch: create programs that do something you need, the way you wish they'd do them.
Chance to write the sort of code YOU want to write, not what your boss wants you to write or some committee says you should write.
Chance to learn new technologies, either because you find them exciting or as resume-building material you can't get through your job.
Chance to use a language you like better than the one they use at work.
Fame and glory. Okay, that's flippant, but it really is a chance to get your name on something that's useful to a lot of people, which a lot of programmers don't get from work (a lot of programming jobs involve writing little one-off stuff few people will ever see, internal websites, business apps, etc.)
Chance to get known in a community as a good developer, so you can eventually get paid for working on that or similar projects.
That last one is especially important for anyone trying to break into programming jobs: students, career changers, people with the wrong sort of connections who got stuck in a dead-end job instead of real programming.
Another developer, Daniel Pittman says:
A huge range of reasons, but the biggest one for me is education My job doesn't pay for spending an hour or more each day learning, but keeping up with the industry requires it. Working on FOSS means that I can play with new and exciting things that are different to what I have used before, or that are speculative and edge things that /might/ be useful at
work. Keeping up, in turn, means that I keep being a desirable hire in the industry, so helps keep me in the style to which I have become accustomed. ;)
What does a person get out of writing Free software?
Experience, community, and a sense of achievement.
For the full article, visit linuxplanet.com (http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/6807/1/)