[FM Discuss] A side note about participation in free software

[Andy Oram]

I'm going to post a couple messages about a thread that had a week or so ago. The discussion of motivation and who participates in writing documentation was great. I hope to get back to it sometime, although we probably just need to wait and learn more.

But I followed up with part of a blog:

http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/07/maybe-software-services-could.html#participation

A European free software advocate recently told me that the number of developers in free software seemed to be on the decline. Other people I've talked to about this subject said they see no evidence of this. But I could imagine a few reasons that people might find other distractions and spend less time coding:

    * There are other cool things to do online: multimedia, blogging, participation in social networks, and now even input into government actions (see my recent series on open government). Whereas programming used to be a unique way to share creativity with people around the world, digital media and networks now grant wide influence to many other pastimes.
    * Programmers are tempted by Software as a Service, which offers an even faster and more convenient way than free software does to expose functions to the public. I bet a lot of the people developing SaaS sites here at OSCon would be developing free software packages for download a decade ago (although many still do that in addition to SaaS).
    * Most big, popular projects have come under the patronage of corporations, who provide the bulk of the programmers out of their paid staff. (Of course, many projects also take the opposite path, originating in a corporation and winning over a large volunteer community later; Eclipse and Firefox are examples.)

If some professional researcher released data showing a decline in the number of free software programmers, these are reasons I would offer. But I think voluntarism in free software is still vibrant. It seems like releases are coming faster than ever. And every week some project developed by an inspired individual hits the newswire.