Motivation for Contributing to Open Source?

On my personal site last week, I talked about Contributing to Open Source projects in a variety of ways ranging from helping with documentation to writing code to just finding and talking about the tools you find useful.

I talked about it without considering a simple question that - luckily - Dennis Crane of Dr Explain asked:

Keith, why [do] you help and contribute [to] open source projects? What's your motivation?

It's a very good question and the answer should sound familiar to quite a few people...

Magento Feature Analysis Series, Part 2: Product Browsing Offering

This post is the second part of a series covering the feature set of the Magento PHP-based e-commerce package. In particular, it will review the product browsing features.

php|tek 2009: Elizabeth Smith on PHP GTK

Elizabeth Smith sits down to talk about PHP-GTK and why it might make more sense than Adobe AIR for desktop development.

Elizabeth Smith's site

php|tek 2009: Travis Swicegood on Git vs Subversion

Travis Swicegood sits down to talk about Git and playing well between Git and Subversion.

Travis Swicegood's site

php|tek 2009: Arbi Arzoumani on Conference Organization

Arbi Arzoumani - publisher of php|architect magazine - sits down to talk with us about php|architect magazine, php|tek planning, conference chaos, and some of the things that most attendees will never notice.

php|tek 2009: Sebastian, Stefan, and Arne on Code Reviews

Sebastian Bergmann, Stefan Priebsch, and Arne Blankerts talking about Code Review, Best Practices, and their thoughts on each.

I grabbed them for this discussion as their session on Code Review received quite a bit of negative intention questioning their motives in reviewing Open Source projects.

Their sites: Sebastian Bergmann, Stefan Priebsch, and Arne Blankerts

php|tek 2009: Robert Purcell and Matt Schraeder on Conference Thoughts

Just after the closing keynote, I talked with Robert and Matt about the conference, their thoughts, and the chaos that went on.

Their sites: Matt Schraeder and Robert Purcell

php|tek 2009: Aaron McCall on The Conference Experience

Just after the closing keynote, I tracked down Aaron to talk about his experience at php|tek 2009 and a couple of his favorite presentations.

phptek 2009: Brett Bieber on PEAR2

I managed to convince Brett to talk with me for a few minutes about his efforts with PEAR2, etc. Unfortunately, the last 5-10s got cut off by some moron repeatedly calling... arg.

Brett Bieber's Site

php|tek 2009: Wez Furlong on PHP Core Development

I sat down to talk with Wez Furlong - creator of PDO and many other things - about the recent core PHP developers' meeting, their priorities, and related topics.

Wez Furlong's site

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