Reading08: Motivation (or lack thereof)

I'm so washed. It's so joever. Every morning I wake up and tell myself that I have all of this free time to work on a personal project or read a few articles about a new release, and every night I lie awake in bed hating myself for attempting neither. While I do keep my schedule pretty busy, I always wonder how hackers have motivation, and time, outside of school or work to contribute to projects for fun.

"What we see implied in hacker ownership customs is a Lockean theory of property rights in one subset of the noosphere, the space of all programs. Hence `homesteading the noosphere', which is what every founder of a new open-source project does."

While I've never really contributed to an open-source project, I never would think to do so just so I can claim partial "ownership" of the service. I don't think this is what ESR was getting at, either, but I was interested in how much of this essay was dedicated to defining this concept. I have always thought of these contributions to simply be motivated by a bug that an individual found and knew how to fix, a feature they always wanted to be implemented, or another external reason that benefits both themselves and the entire community.

Of course it's important to have a license for an open-source project so it can't be ripped and claimed as someone else's--this concept makes sense to me. I just find it hard to believe that there are so many cases in which ESR's taboos are being broken. I just feel that if someone goes through the trouble of making a positive modification to a software that they intend to use on a regular basis, it's hard to believe that they wouldn't want to share this progress with the owner(s). Let's be real, people love talking about cool things they've done, and this is no different.

"[I]f you want the most efficient production, you must give up trying to make programmers produce. Handle their subsistence, give them their heads, and forget about deadlines."

I don't know if I've turned a single one of these responses in on time. I always feel bad because I don't want it to be seen as disrespectful towards the professor, but I also don't want to just turn in some bs that will get the grade but has no true thought behind it. This has become a major issue for me, as I've gotten used to asking for extensions and turning assignments in late as long as I can mathematically stay afloat.

I have always found that the most influential classes I've taken (in both high school and college) have been those in which the professor is motivated by the material that they are teaching. These same professors have also been open to extensions on work to allow the students time to actually learn the material at their own pace. While in most cases deadlines are extremely important (and I really need to learn how to manage my time better to meet them),  it is a nice breath of fresh air to be able to produce work on the individual's schedule. This is probably why open-source contributions are so effective--the hacker is self-motivated to be a part of the project. There is no external force telling them that they need to do so. I was so impressed by Blender, GNU, and the other open-source projects my peers presented on in class and how robust they were. The fact that hackers just spent their free time building these programs is incredible. Open-source projects like these are just few examples of what happens when you give an individual the materials and freedom to simply create.

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