Motivations [was: Re: Non GPL Python MySQL Client Library.]

[François Pinard]

[Paramjit Oberoi]

> I can't claim to speak for others, but the few contributions that
> I have made to open source software projects have been because
> the software didn't do what I wanted it to do, and I was simply
> implementing that functionality for myself.  The exact license
> probably doesn't affect people with this motivation... we do what we
> have to do, despite the license.

Interesting.  Your remark triggers myself into asking why I contributed,
and into noticing that my own motivations changed over time.

Surely, at the beginning and for a lot of years, my main motivation was
thanking the free software community in some real way, where I could,
for all I already received from it.  Nothing so special really, it's
merely part of my education and values to do such things.

An unexpected return of this effort is that, over the years, it put me
in contact with really a *lot* of interesting people, some of which even
became very good friends.  The drawback was the pain of taking technical
and administrative care of complex or difficult software and projects,
sometimes quite far beyond my own interests, and the huge amounts of
energy it all required.  The contact with people, accidental at first,
progressively became my principal reward.  But also my doom, as there
were essential, but non-pleasurable contacts I could not ignore nor escape.

But most of this is now all over, as I have the feeling of having well
repaid my share to the community, and also because I have less energy
now than I used to.  So, why do I still contribute a few tiny things,
once in a while?  I may be a bit more like Paramjit now: I do things
to meet my own needs, and sometimes think some of them may be useful
to a few others as well, not much, yet enough to warrant the effort of
sharing.  That effort surely exists when I have to produce a kind of
Python packaging and some documentation I do not really need :-). And to
my surprise and pleasure, I'm still getting nice contacts out of these
simple publications!  Moreover, my things being humble enough, I may
ignore what I do not like, without any real fear of impacting my users.

P.S. - I guess I could contribute more, and in other ways, if there were
not those damned bug trackers! :-). I much prefer these UI failures with
those who enjoy them, knowing anyway that what I do not do, others will.

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard