| His previous sentence is telling: > The types of desires that motivate open-source developers are the same as those of creative people in other fields Yes, that does seem to be true! However, he draws the conclusion exactly backwards: for most creative people, it is the desire to create which is paramount, but the tedious necessity of making a living leads to a lot of aesthetic compromise and time wasted on business overhead, which would all be joyfully jettisoned if there were some other way of meeting one's material needs. If artists could satisfy that desire to create without having to worry about making money, most artists would probably not bother to charge for their work at all, because charging money introduces a whole layer of accounting and taxes and promotion and (oh my god, just kill me now) process which purely distracts from the goal of making art. For me, the fascination and satisfaction of creating software came long before any prospect of making a living at it. For most of my career, I also wrote code in my free time, to give away, for the sheer joy of it. It is inherently satisfying to make something beautiful which liberates people from repetitive drudgery. Running a business is tedious and time-consuming. The amount of money I could make selling the kinds of things I like to work on would be trivial, and the kind of work I would have to do in order to make enough money to justify the side-project would be... well, I already have a job! Why would I want a second, worse job on top? It's not worth the hassle. I'd rather spend my free time contributing to the global commons and feeling good about it. |