On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 6:43 AM, Baytiyeh, Hoda <hodabn@utk.edu> wrote:

Hello,

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Instructional Technology at the University of Tennessee. My dissertation focuses on what motivates people to contribute to F/OSS projects. Though it may seem obvious to you, many non-programmers are still suspicious of OSS and think there must be a catch. Can you help me to demonstrate why talented programmers are willing to work for free? My survey should take no more than 15 minutes and asks for no identifying information.

Ahh see theres the ticket. The vast majority of programmers who work on Koha aren't working for free. I worked on Koha for 9 years as my job. All the programmers at Biblibre, or Liblime get paid also. Sure we do some non paid work too, and some people don't get paid anything, but the majority are. But you have just explained why people are suspicious right there, there is a general misunderstanding that F/OSS means uncommercial. IBM pays people to work on the Linux kernel, Redhat pays its staff,... F/OSS does not stop people being paid for their work. What it does do is allow people to choose who they pay, or indeed to make changes themselves. In fact, with F/OSS its more likely people get paid to programme and less people get paid to resell that programming effort again and again and again and again. Chris _______________________________________________ Koha-devel mailing list Koha-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/koha-devel