There is a book which mentions, among others, the Israeli daycare case, and which addresses directly the question of motivations, which I hadn’t read at the time, but since picked up & devoured in a few hours: “Freakonomics” by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. It also has pointers to several other interesting and relevant stories related to cash as a motivator.

The nut of the issue is that if you’re going to use cash as a motivator, then you’d better make it worth the effort, and be prepared to lose the motivation of people for whom cash is/was not the primary motivator if they’re not paid.

Cheers,
Dave.

If you want open source software to be developed by and for amateurs who are too geeky to get a life, then fine. But I think it will implode on itself after a while if that’s all there is to it – if you want real effort dotting Is, crossing Ts and making open source actually compete with alternatives for disinterested non-technical users, then you’ll have to make it acceptable for payment to be offered and received, because some aspects of the software delivery process as a whole are definitely Work, not Play. And some software isn’t glamorous.

If I had to pick important bits of software to me, it wouldn’t be instant messaging, multimedia or fancy browsing – it would be payroll and customer invoicing.

That’s why I think the Swiss survey found that more people answered positively to storing the nuclear waste in their town when the researchers appealed to the person’s sense that they are part of a larger community. The townspeople probably felt they would be helping their fellow citizens by allowing the waste in their town; they can see that it isnt just about their personal preferences anymore.

It’s the same when open source works well — when programmers can see that they are helping others, this is the greatest reward that they can get. The more this is emphasized in an open source project, the better off the project will be. When you bring in selfish rewards, it tends to take away the feeling of community.

An open source project could also be started by someone who wants fame, or money, without also wanting to help others. In this case I would guess the project would not be very successful. Sure, its fine to make a living by doing it, or to achieve fame, but the primary motivation should be to help others if you want your project to succeed.

I can definitely see that – it would be “unfair” and most developers I know are somewhat idealistic and definitely fans of fair in the sense that rewards should be given out for results or effort or talent.

Stormy