Why Open Source Works (Alex Gaynor)

Why Open Source
Works
Alex Gaynor
PyCon Canada
Sunday, August 11, 13
Hi everyone. Thanks for coming out. I’m super thrilled to be here, this now makes 4 PyCons,
in 4 countries, on 3 continents in the last year for me. So that’s really cool, thanks for having
me. A huge round of applause for the organizers, this has been a phenomenal conference
thus far.

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Why this talk?
So ﬁrst things ﬁrst, why give this talk? A lot of people would say “isn’t it enough that it
works?” Why do we care why it works?

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3 years ago...
3 years ago, almost to the day, August 15th, 2010, I gave a talk at an education conference
titled “Open Source and Education”. I talked to a group of educators and researchers about
the practices we were using in open source. Speciﬁcally about the overlaps between
techniques from pedagogy, from teaching, and practices we’ve organically developed in the
open source community.

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The cobblers children
have no shoes
And a few months ago I get approached about speaking here, and I start thinking “what are
the things I know about that people might want to hear”. And I realized through
conversations I’ve had, a lot of people actively working in open source don’t really know
these things. So I ﬁgured it was something worth sharing.

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What do I know about
Open Source?
Before I really dive in, I figure you might want to know how I know stuff about open source. . I
write a lot of it; I’m a core dev for Django, CPython, PyPy; my day job is now working on open
source, from libcloud to openstack, and many other projects at Rackspace. I help shepherd it:
I serve as a director of the Python Software Foundation, and before that of the Django
Software Foundation. And of course, I use it all the time, so I’m approaching this from a lot of
angles. Anything I say about psychology, pedagogy, or sociology is something I read in a
paper somewhere. I’m not an expert in those fields, please call me out if I get something
wrong. The conference organizers seem to be messing with my head a little, they put me
between two individuals who are actually qualified to speak on this stuff.

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What practices are we
concerned with?
Before we dive into the “why”, we should spend a few minutes discussing the “what” of open
source, because open source describes a pretty wide range of behaviors

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• Code dumps
• Public development
•Open development
So the way I see it there are about three types of software that match the definition of open
source. The first is code dumps, here’s some software, look it’s open! This is basically the
same as closed source development, except there’s some code you and I can look at at the
end. The next is public development, this is something like Android, theres a public VCS
repo, you can see people working on it, but the progress isn’t driven by a process open to the
public. And finally there’s open development, this is what we’re going to talk about today,
and this is probably what most of the OSS projects you know are: this is Django, this is
Python, this is OpenStack, this is Linux, etc.

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• Pull requests / contributing patches
• Code review
• Bug reports
• IRC / mailing lists
Open development
practices
These are some of the practices exhibited by open development projects, certainly not an
exhaustive list.

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• Writing code
• Reviewing Code
• Providing support
Many many many developer hours. Often from either our free time, or our employers time.
Why do we volunteer our time like this, why do our employers let us spend *their* time on
this stuff? Those are the questions I want to try to answer for us. Because intuitively it’s
bonkers, who lets their employees give away their code, what person goes home and does
the same type of stuff as they do at the job.

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What do we believe?
So to begin unpacking this, ﬁrst I wanted to take a look at what people believe themselves. So
I put out a survey, 3 questions, “Do you contribute to Open Source?”, “Why do you contribute
to Open Source?”, “Why don't you contribute to open source any more (or as much as you'd
like to)?”. 150 responses. ~50% contribute regularly, 28% have contributed in the past, 15%
have not contributed before, 5% other. Decent sample size, population is biased, it’s all
people within one or two degrees of me socially, and I have weird social circles. So those are
the opinions I collected.

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Why do we contribute
to open source?
There were some really varied answers to “Why do you contribute to open source?”, I’ve tried
to coalesce ones that were the same, and I’m only going to talk about some of the more
common answers.

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Because I gained /
To give back
This was, by a decent margin, the most common answer. A lot of people feel their
professional lives have beneﬁted hugely from their usage of open source, so they want to pay
it forward, so to speak.

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Improve a thing I use
“Scratch your own itch” is another strong motivator, people who use software hit bugs or
need more features and then they want to ﬁx them and share that with the world. If you hang
around the development lists for Django or Python you’ve probably heart someone say
something like, “Well, I don’t have this need, but maybe if you do and you write the code, it’s
worth having”, so people’s intuition has some merit, we write the software we need.

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For fun
A lot of us apparently like writing software enough that we’ll do it in our spare time, as well
as for a job.

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Develop skills /
Career advancement
I’ve bunched these together, but they’re actually pretty different. People who wrote about
developing skills tended to talk about working with talented programmers, getting really
good code reviews, or learning new code bases. In contract, career advancement was about
the professional visibility that comes from contributing to open source. That’s not to say it’s
a bad thing, just a different thing.

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Be a part of a
community
People want to be a part of something. In particular people wrote about being a part of
something that they didn’t have access to where they lived.

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Keep the world running
Open source powers nearly everything, to one degree or another, a lot of people want to keep
that up. This is in some senses a variation on “To give back”, it also encompass things like “I
love knowing that tons of companies use my work”.

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It’s my job
Some people get paid to write open source all day. I’m really lucky to be one of them. There
are companies literally paying people to give away software. That’s awesome.

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But doesn’t this make
no sense?
This is a question I get a lot from friends and family members. Why are you writing all this
software and giving it away, couldn’t you sell it and make some money? I’d characterize this
as the naive economists point of view. Yeah, I could sell some of the stuff I write (some of it
really has no commercial value of course), but I value a lot of other things as well. The master
economist knows that there are things besides money which incentivize.

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The motivation of
individuals
Thus far we’ve talked a lot about what people believe about what they do. Now I want to dive
into some of what the academic literature says. This isn’t speciﬁcally research on open source
contribution, but more general research on what motivates us to work and to learn.

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Mastery
The ﬁrst thing is we want to obtain a skill. We all want to be able to say “I’m good at this”, we
want to understand in greater depth our craft. Open source rewards and encourages this. We
get to work with experts who’ll review our code, we get to take time with no deadlines to
perfect our patch, and to try to learn something new. I want to learn more about unit testing,
I can ﬁnd a project that needs some tests and contribute. Why do the “experts” want to take
their time to code review? Because they care about the health of their projects, and new
contributors are the lifeblood of that, by helping someone level up their skills you’re
grooming a future maintainer, and you never know who’s going to outpace you and make the
project better than you imagined.

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Autonomy and
creativity
People want to be in control of what they do. And no one tells you what to do in open source.
Some days I work on a compiler, some days I do cryptography (PS: this is scary), some days I
work on an ORM or a web framework. I direct myself to projects I’m interested in, to things I
care about. I also get to choose how I work on these things, in terms of the aesthetics of
code, architectural decisions. I work with others because I value their knowledge and
opinions, but I ultimately have direction over how I work on them.

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Community
We want to be a part of something. To work with and learn from others. To help bring new
people into the fold. To see a little piece of software grow up and change the world.

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Things we don’t have
There are also some features we don’t have, that a lot of people think help motivate us, but
in fact don’t.

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Rewards
There’s almost no extrinsic rewards for working on Django. The biggest reward I can give
another developer, is to make them also a core developer, to enable them to contribute more.
There’s a ton of research on this subject, simply put, for intellectual, creative tasks, rewards
don’t motivate you. In fact they de-motivate you, they replace your intrinsic motivation with
extrinsic. Instead of contributing because you want to help the community, you contribute for
the reward, and when the reward goes away, so does your motivation. The funny bit, and
there’s research that shows this: even when you give people these facts, they still want to
believe that rewards work.

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Coercion
I can’t force you to work on something. We sat down to write documentation about security
policy for Django, and this is something important right, particularly we wanted to give
people a hard timeline, if you report a security issue, we WILL respond within 48 hours. How
do you make that guarantee when it’s everyone’s free time? What can you say, oh do this or
we’ll ﬁre you from this thing you donate in your free time? Ethical issues aside, when you’re
coerced you perform worse, and you care about the quality of your work less. We can make
statements like “response in 48 hours” precisely because everyone participates voluntarily,
we understand this is important so we make it a priority for ourselves, and that gives way
better results.

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Evaluation
We don’t try to rank contributors, we don’t try to give you a score, no “You get a B+ on
Django this month”. It turns out there are 3 primary effects of evaluating in this way, a) You
become motivated by the evaluation, the grade becomes a reward, b) you care less about the
underlying work, and c) you seek the easiest task that gets you good evaluations, you don’t
try to challenge yourself, because that might get you a worse grade at contributing to
Django. In contrast, open source gives feedback. Here’s how you can improve this patch,
here’s how you’re doing a great job helping out on the mailing lists, if you focus on this
aspect of your code reviews, you’ll be more effective.

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The motivations of
companies
That’s individuals, but what about companies? Surely they could make more money, and have
fewer competitors, why give away the secret sauce? But instead companies are some of the
biggest drivers of open source, the majority of the work on the Linux kernel is by people paid
to work on it, for example.

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Giving back
No seriously. Companies want to give back to. They recognize that when they choose an
open source technology, it’s not a static thing, that they need to help promote and grow the
community of developers, and that they can help by improving it.

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Improvements from the
community and
accelerating growth
An open community can improve software beyond what an individual company can do.
OpenStack is a really fantastic example of this, the project moves at a lightning pace, they do
hundreds of CI runs a day (often hundreds an hour!), with many companies and individuals
contributing.

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Grow a community
Companies want to be a part of a community too. Speciﬁcally it means things like, you can
hire people with existing skill sets, you don’t have to train someone on your custom
framework, it’s the hot new thing that everyone knows already.

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Competition
+
Cooperation
I think the key to recognizing why corporate involvement in open source is that competition
and cooperation are not mutually exclusive, and neither is a static mode of behavior. There
are things that it’s important we cooperate on, and there are things where competition helps
produce better results.

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Challenges
I’ve been super positive so far, but I want to share some of the challenges as well, like Jacob
said yesterday, challenge is just another word for opportunity, it’s places we can get better.
These are challenges that individuals face in contributing to open source, and challenges that
communities face.

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Time and money
This is a big one for people who want to contribute, or want to contribute more than they do.
When their work comes out of their free time, it’s pretty strictly bounded by how much real
life interferes. Money clashes a bit with what I said about rewards right, does paying people
to work on open source change it’s nature? This is a longer conversation, and I don’t have the
research to fully back this up, but my experience says there’s a fundamental difference
between paying someone for their freetime, and allowing them to make it their full time.

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Building welcoming
communities
This is a huge challenge for open source communities. I think in the Python community in
particular has done great work here over the past few years. But there’s always room for
improvement. We can do an even better job, being welcoming to people of diverse
backgrounds, different levels of ability, and different perspectives. Unfortunately one of the
most common reasons people identiﬁed for not participating in open source was because of
jerky maintainers. We need to strive to be a community where that isn’t ok.

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Feeling of inability
Another common reason not to contribute is feeling like you don’t have the skills or the
knowledge or the background needed. I’m not totally sure how we solve this, but we need to,
because everyone can help. I have over 120 repositories on github. It’s no exaggeration to
say half of those are forks I created to ﬁx a single typo. And wearing my maintainer hat I have
to say, I love when someone sends me a typo ﬁx patch, every little bit helps.

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Cliff Gardner
Anyone here heard of Philo Farnsworth? He invented television, in Provo, Utah, and then did
the ﬁrst TV broadcast from San Francisco. He was a visionary, and he died broke. But I really
want to tell you about his brother in law, Cliff Gardner. Cliff saw Philo’s drawings, and
recognized that this was something that was going to be important, so he said, “I don’t really
understand the science behind all of this, but it looks like you’re going to need glass tubes,
how would it be if I learned to blow glass and made them for you?”, Philo was inventing the
cathode receptor, and glass tubes weren’t really a thing you could buy, “This looks important,
and I want to help” is what Cliff said. That’s open source.

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With apologies to
Aaron Sorkin
Before I continue the metaphor, I want to point out that the majority of that is taken from a
TV show written by Aaron Sorkin called Sports Night, and I highly recommend you all watch.
Aaron, if you read or hear this, please don’t sue me.

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Open source
=
glass tubes
Open source is glass tubes. Almost none of us will start the next linux kernel, but we can all
learn to contribute. The majority of open source is not creating the next great new project,
it’s contributing a missing paragraph to the docs, it’s writing a great bug report with a test
case, it’s adding the small missing feature. We contribute because we’ve built our hobbies or
our careers on this stuff, and we know it’s important, because it’s fun, because it helps us
learn, because it lets us be a part of something. And we can all learn to blow glass tubes.

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Sprints
If I’ve convinced you there’s any merit at all to this whacky open source thing, I’d like to
encourage you to join the sprints. There’ll be people from a lot of projects, who want nothing
more than to help you get started contributing.

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Thank you.
[email protected] / @alex_gaynor
https://speakerdeck.com/alex
Before we ﬁnish, I want to apologize quickly, original versions of this talk came with citations
and more statistics to back up some of the studies I mentioned. Unfortunately those are all in
a pad of paper back at my apartment in San Francisco, whoops. If there’s any interest at all,
reach out to me, on twitter or email, and I’ll get those online. Thank you all for coming and
listening, thanks you all for your past contributions to open source, thank you for your future
contributions. We’ve got some time for questions now.

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Why Open Source Works (Alex Gaynor)

Why Open Source Works (Alex Gaynor)

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