Requiem for the Volunteer Open Source Contributor
Open Source has forever altered technology. What was once seen as a sketchy, alternative method of software licensing and development, has now become the de-facto standard. And as it caused the software industry to evolve and grow, the IT landscape itself was modified due to the inexorable movement of open source, just as the geology of the Earth itself was refaced by the passage of glaciers.
There are numerous reasons for the success of Open Source, and in pretty much all situations, those reasons have strengthened and become entrenched. But one of the vital forces of Open Source, and arguable one of the most important, has seen a decline, an almost chilling waning of its place in the pantheon. Where once it almost seemed to define Open Source, it’s now a rarity, on its way to extinction. And the impacts of this decline on the long term vitality of Open Source has the potential to be that 1st tipping domino, threatening to take down the whole structure. I speak of the importance of the volunteer Open Source contributor.
When Open Source first started growing, the volunteer contributor was its mitochondria. People worked on those projects because they had a personal interest in them; on their own free time, they worked relentlessly to improve and advance the project. They weren’t paid to do so, for the most part, but they enjoyed and thrived in an environment where they could be the masters of their own destinies, and collaborate with other like minded people on a project that they could truly say was “theirs”. Such an environment pulled in the best and the brightest, eager for the freedom to work together to collectively scratch their own itch, as the saying goes. The result was that these Open Source projects soon outperformed commercial contenders, because of the tight feedback loop between user and contributor that Open Source enabled. In fact, that was one of the unspoken goals: to encourage Users to become Contributors and to make it as easy as possible for that to happen.
