Comments on: Fraternal Nearness

By: Ulises

Ulises — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 17:27:00 +0000

You have provided a good illustration of some of the concepts I was playing with, so thanks, Jonah. I agree that we need more examples and applications, and it would be great if some of that could happen around our wiki. BTW, have you looked at The Hacker Ethic (obviously, a reference to Weber's The Protestant Ethic)? The author analyses many of the issues you are interested in, as far as what motivates a hacker. It also contains chapters by Linus Torvalds and Manuel Castells, so I recommend it highly. (You've probably read it already!)

By: Molly Krause

Molly Krause — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 04:24:00 +0000

Hey Jonah — You mention that OSS developers’ motivations may include status, recognition, an escape from ‘reality’ or an immersion in an environment that the developer completely controls. What about the potential for business networking / resume building /job opportunities? While passion for the open source vision may be the ultimate reason for action, I have numerous friends who have received job opportunities that came about because of their open source work. I feel as though this plays at least some sort of role (however small).

Also, if you’re interested in looking for real life examples of these open source communities to study or research, I know of a group of developers in San Francisco that meets once a month and works on all their different open source projects together (as the “SuperHappyDevHouse”
). Interesting group, really great people.

- Molly

By: akhi003

akhi003 — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 02:38:00 +0000

Jonah,

That is an interesting analogy that you pose between open source developers and members of a fraternity. I can speak from the fraternity side, as I helped create a chapter of my fraternity (Beta Chi Theta) during undergrad. To generalize, these organizations are comprised of similar people with similar goals who work with one another for a common cause.

Often times these relationships last past those few years of being together. This may be the greatest disparity in your analogy. Nonetheless, it just goes to show that communities are a lot more similar to each other than what society depicts them as.

-nabeel