What Keeps Developers Happy? Contributing to Open Source
'This week long-time open source advocate Matt Asay warned employers that the best way to keep their developers happy was to let them contribute to open source projects: SlashData recently surveyed over 16,000 developers to see what makes them tick... what they care about. The data is collected in SlashData's State of the Developer Nation, though let me give you the tl;dr: 59% of developers contribute to open source software today. Why do they contribute? The top two reasons are: To improve coding skills and because they believe in open source. Want to keep those developers happy and employed with you? Let them contribute... [Y]our employees want to contribute both code and knowledge — they want to be part of something. Talking to Bert Hubert, founder of PowerDNS, a supplier of open source DNS software, services, and support, he stressed that an open source project must be "a fun place where people feel that they are learning things, that they're contributing things, that they're being valued." Perhaps not surprisingly, these are the same elements developers expect from their employers. By making open source a valued part of workplace expectations, employers tick both boxes. Is it an absolute requirement that you encourage your developers to contribute to open source projects? No. But many of your best developers will chafe at keeping their talents locked up behind the firewall, and other developers simply won't apply if you have a reputation for being an open source scrooge. The article was written by Matt Asay, a former COO of Canonical now working at AWS. (Right before becoming Canonical's COO, Matt answered questions from Slashdot readers). The survey he cites also found that out of 17,000 developers they talked to, just 3% said they were paid to contribute to open source. The other 97% contributed for free.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/05/03/1746244 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
On Mon, 4 May 2020 08:57:45 +1200, Peter Reutemann quoted:
'But many of your best developers will chafe at keeping their talents locked up behind the firewall ...'
In my earlier time as an aficionado of certain proprietary companies’ products, I remember discussions with company employees over work they had done on some wonderful new product. And you know how, all too often, those products fail to be a shining success in the marketplace. Sometimes they simply get abandoned by the company, because it doesn’t fit in with their overall “vision” or “strategy” or whatever (aka “internal company politics”). You can imagine the effect of this kind of thing on morale. Even if this situation doesn’t fundamentally change for a company’s proprietary products, still, letting the employees contribute to open-source projects can be a form of stress relief, preventing the frustrations from building up.
participants (2)
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro -
Peter Reutemann