Boredom Drives Open-Source Developers?

Henry McClyde writes "Chris Anderson of The Long Tail posted an article yesterday in which he claims that "spare cycles" — or boredom and the tons of people who wish they had something better to do — is what drives Web 2.0.... and the open source development community. While Web 2.0 in general is driven by "the long tail," NeoSmart seems to have taken up issue with Anderson's claims that open source developers (and other freeware programmers in general) do what they do because they're bored and have nothing better to spend their time on. Same with Wikipedia contributors, and bloggers in general."

Wrong

[Billosaur (927319)]

Spare cycles power Slashdot...

Slashdot is on another scale

[DrYak (748999)]

Slashdot is playing the gamt at an entirely different order of magnitude.

A couple of spare cycle is what you need to build Linux.
On the same scale, the amount of time wasted on /. should leed us to find a cure for cancer.

Re:Wrong

[Patrik_AKA_RedX (624423)]

I would say that slashdot stand to boredom as a black hole stands to matter. So highly concentrated it distorts reality.

Re:Wrong

[pragma_x (644215)]

I disagree.

Take me for example: I'm so busy I can't even post right now.

How about calling avoidance of other boring work?

[monkeyboythom (796957)]

maybe it is not about being bored but more about not wanting to do that crappy assignment your boss wants you to do? Maybe creating a better disk partition method for detecting NTSF, sizing correctly, and loading GRUB efficiently feels better to do than that cover sheet for the TPS report?

People want to feel useful at work. Certainly the greatest percentage doesn't do it for the money so what about doing something useful with your time than being a cog in someone else's soulless business machine?

Re:How about calling avoidance of other boring wor

[packetmon (977047)]

Actually, I develop stuff for myself out of... "I wonder if I can automate this so I won't have to do it again..." Typical lazy sysadmin stuff. Most of the times I end up creating my own little program of sorts and at times I usually post stupid/handy little scripts. Does it qualify for open source, perhaps. Maybe that's why I'm always bored, I've been automating my work for too long

Re:How about calling avoidance of other boring wor

[loconet (415875)]

I totally agree. I have personally, in several occasions, taken a break from my job as a programmer by coding something else. Maybe in a different language, something totally unrelated to my day to day projects and usually something that I would release as open source. In a way, it helped me maintain my sanity while I did something I love to do. However, nowadays I rather go out for a run and enjoy real sun light.

girlfriends and OSS

[AndyST (910890)]

I was about to start an open source project, mostly to educate myself as my current IT jobs is custom one-time software only. Well, to make it short, I recently got a girlfriend. No more OSS coding for me.

Re:girlfriends and OSS

[danbert8 (1024253)]

HAHAHA, like we believe that. Let me give you a slashdot translation lesson:
 
Post says, "I recently got a girlfriend". Post means "I recently found a porn magazine".
Post says, "I was about to start an open source project". Post means "I was using an open source program and I thought it was decent so I considered writing a MAN page for it".
 
Lesson 1 completed. Tomorrow's lesson, how to talk to a n00b.

Re:girlfriends and OSS

[Paulrothrock (685079)]

Just wait till you have a wife. I try writing my own stuff and I never have the time to. I actually have stuff to do at work, so I can't work on anything there, and when I go home my wife insists that I "spend time" with her. And, apparently, tapping away at my Powerbook while she watches TV doesn't count.

I'm hopeful that once we have a kid I'll be relegated to the role of grocery courier and she'll have someone else to bother all the time. But I'm not going to hold my breath. (First kid's due in October.)

Re:girlfriends and OSS

[Maltheus (248271)]

Perhaps someone could explain the upside of family to me then. Seriously. I'm unlike everyone else I know because I have little interest in answering to a wife or taking care of kids every minute. I'm so swamped now, even without them, that I never have enough time for all the fun and fulfilling projects I work on. So outside of sex, and having someone to go out to eat with, what precisely is the appeal of marriage for everyone? No one ever regrets their kids, but kids also seem to suck the life out of everyone I've met. They just have this droning voice and distant stare as they say they don't ever regret it. I truly wish I could understand this better. Everyone else seems to just get it. Are they posing or am I just that disconnected?

352 webcam drivers?

[gEvil (beta) (945888)]

325 webcam drivers anyone? [slashdot.org] I mean, what else other than boredom would prompt someone to write 523 webcam drivers?

Procrastination

[Gertlex (722812)]

I edit Wikipedia, "tinker" with programs and graphics, and blog all as a means for relaxation from whatever work I should be doing (homework, in my case). Gaming tends to take long periods of time... and that's a prime formula for guilt trips about laziness ;)

It's the same with READING Web 2.0 content... And why I'm reading /. and posting here.

What?

[packetmon (977047)]

You know... I was bored and decided to read this article then got an idea... Instead of wasting my life read /., what I should be doing is writing code....

wget -qO - http://www.infiltrated.net/slashdot|\
ruby -lne 'puts STDIN.readlines.reverse!.slice(0,2).reverse!;#suck er'|\
perl -p -e 's/[0-9]//g;s/X/ /g'|\
ruby -pe '$_ = $_.chomp + " " + gets if $. % 2'

True by definition

[Diomidis Spinellis (661697)]

open source developers (and other freeware programmers in general) do what they do because they have nothing better to spend their time on.

This is by definition true for any activity we undertake. If there was something more profitable, enjoyable, pressing, useful to do, we (as rational thinkers) would be doing it.

So what?

[Bueller_007 (535588)]

So what's wrong with that? What's wrong with converting one's boredom or downtime into a product that benefits people?

I haven't read the article, so I don't know if this is supposed to be a slam against open-source contributors or not, but I think it's safe to say that people who choose to do this with their free time are certainly being more productive than those who just sit and play Evercrack for hours on end.

If these people were charging for their product, you'd call their motivation "entrepreneurial spirit", but since they're giving it away, you slight them by saying that they contribute only because they're bored?

well, in part

[jimstapleton (999106)]

It also involves wanting to help others out, or make something better for themselves.

Some similar things outside of computers:

1) (this is a bit in excess of what OSS typically has in terms of altruism) - I have friends who do Habitat For Humanity on Saturdays. One could say this is out of boredom, but it is also (and one case) more believably out of desire to help others.

2) I know a lot of people who do their own home maintenance and "upgrades". This is not only less financially burdensom, but they typically get things done somewhat faster and better than a contractor would.

All these mindsets mindsets (altruism, desire to have direct control of the quality, and greed) can also cause a person to develop OSS, with or without the presence of a "I have time and don't know what to do with it" state.

Money

[Davemania (580154)]

There are alot of excellent open source project that have very good commercial potential. I remember alot of small startup gaming companies developed free mod for half life not because they were bored but they see it as a way to develop a customer base and as a mean to develop a commercial product.

I don't do open source

[hsmith (818216)]

but i do constantly develop outside of work. Work projects are absolutely BORING, doing things on my own engages my brain, allows me to learn new things, and allows me to create things i like.

I could read books, but I enjoy the architecting a solution to a problem more

Boredom

[Rovastar (822365)]

Often boredom leads to half finsihed blog entries, projects and p

Hmph

[debrain (29228)]

[People contributing to open source] do what they do because they're bored and have nothing better to spend their time on

In a lot of cases, people are contributing to something really meaningful and valuable, and to imply that they have nothing better to do is flat out condescending. If one CAN make the Linux kernel (or whichever project) better, there are very few things to be involved in that would go to benefit the public.

The implication that people contributing their valuable time to something like open source is only out of boredom and lack of alternatives is absurd and insulting. That may indeed be the reason why some people contribute, to be sure, but to imply that it is of no value to them, or the world, is utterly lunatic. (On the same continuum and with the same absurdity, the opposing exaggeration is that people contributing to open source are doing it for the betterment of mankind, as against the unrelenting corporate machine.)

I'm fairly certain that the truth lies in the middle, and that for an individual contributing to open source is a valuable way to spend your time because it gives you experience, exposes you to new ideas and people and challenges. As a bonus to the world, these contributions generally improve the publicly accessible wealth of knowledge, ideas and software functionality.

Any implication that these people are doing something of no value to them or the world is disgusting.

sociology

[Zarf (5735)]

In your high school or college sociology class you might have learned that societies are created on the surplus food that a group of humans can create. In other words you don't get tributes to Zeus until there is a surplus of food lying around that the peasants won't mind parting with. The arts, religion, politics, and kingdoms all come from the ready supply of extra food.

The fewer people that are required to produce crops to feed the maximum amount of people frees those people for the pursuit of things like religion, philosophy, politics, literature, technology, or whatever other discipline doesn't lead to the direct creation of crops and cattle.

So basically, yes, Open Source is driven on free clock cycles that don't have to be dedicated to survival. This is even true for the company that commissions open source projects for its own use. If the company wasn't creating enough profit to allow for investment in future growth or any risky investment behavior then it wouldn't have the spare cycles to devote to the investment. And, software is risky it only pays off half the time.

You don't invest in the stock market with your lunch money. You might invest your retirement account in stocks, but not the cash you need to stay alive in the next few days. If the need is too vital it precludes any risk behavior.

If you want more open source, then create an environment where more people can take the risk of creating open source projects and even potentially waste their time on them. Consider that most projects fail. Most projects do not become popular. There must be enough surplus developer time to support those risks so that the one lucky project that changes everything has the chance to get created and have a few people waste their time on it before it becomes a product.

I don't think it's boredom...

[SadGeekHermit (1077125)]

Saying it's boredom cheapens it.

Previous generations had hobbies that let technologists use their skills in ways that gave them pleasure. For example, electrical engineers would tinker with Ham Radio sets, and build gadgets. Because at the time there was no internet, these hobbies tended to be personal and private, although there were some magazines that would allow submissions (and sharing of information).

Modern technologists are far less limited. They have the global internet and the open-source movement, plus a huge infrastructure for sharing information (like Sourceforge and Slashdot) available. It's like a hobbyist renaissance, or maybe the hobbyist version of the Enlightenment.

Who can resist participating? It's marvellous. Your average nerd (myself included) was picked on throughout his childhood, and surrounded by people who didn't share his interests. Now, suddenly, there's a whole world of people who would just LOVE to help you debug your networked application.

It's Nerdvana.

Saying it all derives from boredom is equivalent to saying you don't share our interests, and don't "get" them. It's not cool. We're not bored, we're INSPIRED.

And it's WAY more fun than what we have to do all day at work.

One guy's release from boredom...

[sammy baby (14909)]

...is another guy's passion.

Look, this is a stupid argument, akin to saying that they're doing it "even though they're not getting paid for it." Of course open source developers do it to relieve boredom - if I have available time, and I get bored, know what I do? Something that makes me happy.

The author could have said that open source developers do it because of the joy it brings them, and it would have been functionally equivalent.

Boredom Drives Progress

[tnk1 (899206)]

If you look at history, people who have no time to be bored generally don't find themselves making great leaps in progress. Workmen are certainly hardworking as a class, and many are certainly not dumb, but if you are working all the time on your assigned tasks, it gives you little time to take your notion to fruition. And if you are very focused at your current job, which usually represents some sort of status quo, you're not making progress.

The fact is that a leisure class with the right motivation and philosophy, can be a real benefit to the rest of society. They have the time and money to "follow their dream", for the most part. Many artists, writers, and scientists in the past held down more or less sinecure positions that paid cash even though they really never actually did the job as specified in the job title. A significant portion of notable contributors to progress and art have been outright aristocratic.

Boredom can be aimless and cause no end of trouble, but in the right sorts of people, can lead to progress where it could not otherwise exist.