Philosophical question

[Alain De Vos]

Why do people contribute to the kernel. Or applications. I'm too stupid, but for some this give a sense in life. Doing something for free. In a sense that is what is life is about.

 

[cracauer@]

Compulsion. I hate broken software.

 

[bgavin]

Significance.
And pride in contributing something that works.

 

[eternal_noob]

Placing backdoors.

 

[Crivens]

Placing backdoors.

My, you are a dark one lately...
Everything OK?

Also: improvement, teaching, conserving environment.

 

[eternal_noob]

My, you are a dark one lately...
Everything OK?

I am fine. Thanks for caring.

 

[nxjoseph]

I love FreeBSD and it feels good to contribute in a thing that you like/love, also to a thing you daily drive on your computer. I think, for a quite while, I don't do anything productive in my life other than maintaining some ports for FreeBSD (maybe reading/writing english on here to improve my english counts as another one, i mostly don't consume content on internet in my mother tongue either).

I can't code in programming languages, neither good at/interested in documentation so I took the ports way.

 

[rbranco]

Why do people contribute to the kernel. Or applications. I'm too stupid, but for some this give a sense in life. Doing something for free. In a sense that is what is life is about.

Nothing better to do. I refuse to consume content or anything that puts me in a passive position, so I avoid most forms of entertainment these days: Youtube, podcasts, scrolling, etc.

I prefer to have my mind at work solving problems.

 

[Andriy]

Compulsion. I hate broken software.

Likewise. I mostly fix what annoys me. And sometimes add what I'd like to have when it's missing.

 

[Espionage724]

I contributed a world record space delete https://github.com/LostCityRS/Engine-TS/commit/de5fa4db73add4e7277f0a9045d6eeb3a0800f59

I like and use certain software and while I don't know code to confidently contribute something notable, it's cool to improve little stuff that others can benefit from. I'd like to learn C or C++!

My motivation is also a little show-off on Github to prove I know a bit of how that works But it's still cool to know others benefit!

 

[astyle]

If I have the knowledge to fix something, and can do it in a reasonable amount of time, and I know that it will be useful, I have no problem doing that. But it kind of has to be my call, my itch to have it done. And if someone actually benefits from that, that's nice to know.

 

[JWJones]

My, you are a dark one lately...

Would you expect anything less from someone with an H.P. Lovecraft avatar and signature?

 

[ralphbsz]

(I very rarely do it)
Because it doesn't work for what I need, so I improve it.

Example: Before there were any open-source fortran compilers, there was Bell Labs' f2c, which converted F77 to C, and worked amazingly well. Unfortunately, it didn't implement one vitally important feature of VAX fortran, namely the ability to chain include files without repeating directory names. So I added that feature, which was quite a bit of work (maybe an extra 100 lines of code), because anytime you include a file, you need to remember where it came from, and temporarily (internally) modify the include file search path. I contributed the source to the maintainers. I think f2c has been abandoned, because there are other free compilers, so my changes have probably spent the last decade or two in the dustbin of history.