Are devs contributing to OSS happier? #

When talking to fellow developers or meeting with students it happens from time to time that I get the question of why on earth I spent my freetime working on an open source project? Why do I spend weekends at developers’ conferences like FOSDEM? Why do spent afternoons organising meetups? Why is it that I am reviewing and writing code after work for free?

Usually I point people to a post by Shalin explaining some of his reasons to contribute to open source. The post quite nicely summarises most reasons that match well with why I contribute back.

On the Apache Community mailing list Grant Ingersoll asked the question about whether devs who work on or use open source are happier in their employment.

In his response Mike posted a link to a video on what motivates people that adds another piece of information to the question of why work on open source software can be perceived as very rewarding though no money is involved: With people doing cognitively challenging tasks, motivation via payment can get you only so far. There are other motivational factors that might play an equal if not larger role in getting people to perform well on their day-to-day work:

• Autonomy: If people are supposed to be engaged with their project they need time and freedom to chose how to solve their tasks. Many large engineering driven companies like Google or Atlassian have gone even further by introducing the concept of giving people a day a week to work on what they want how they want provided they share their results. These so-called 20% projects have shown to have high potential of turning into new, creative project ideas but also even into bugs or problems getting fixed.
  
• Mastery: Great developers strive to get better at what they do - simply because realizing that you actually learn something and get better at what you do can be very satisfying. One way of achieving that goal is to work together with peers on common projects. The larger the pool of peers to draw from, the higher the probability of you finding mentors to help you out and to point out mistakes you make.
  
  There is one more factor why working on open source increases your coding level that should not be underestimated. Grant Ingersoll nicely described it in the thread mentioned above: “I was just talking with a friend yesterday, and fellow committer, who said he is a much better programmer since contributing. Of course, it makes sense. If your underwear is on display for all to see, you sure better make sure it is clean!"
  
• Purpose: People like to work on projects for a purpose. Be it to make all information accessible to the world or to turn earth into a better place by making cheap calls available to everyone. As a counter example deploying some software only for the purpose of selling a license and not make life of your client better by recommending the best solution to help solve his problem may not be half as satisfying.