I was introduced to the open source movement 13 years ago while in college because of Linux. A dear friend of mine was frustrated because the availability of UNIX machines in the campus was not enough, besides we couldn't hack during night time (sleep is overrated during college anyways
) so he installed Linux at home, then the rest of the gang followed suit each one, in their own way. I marveled at so many stuff that you could do at that time, because at the other side (the developers doing all the work) were willing to engage in open discussions with their users, they accepted suggestions and code, but most importantly because they loved what they did: hacking code to scratch an itch.So I basked in open source goodness for many years while staying on passive mode, pretty much every paid work I did during those years had a big percentage of open source software/tools/languages as constituent. It eventually hit me 3 years ago: no man is an island. We all are connected somehow, either through action or inaction. It is so easy to stay on the receiving end of the open source movement (nothing wrong with that), but it is much more fun when you get involved with it in any way, be it participating in forums/discussions, sending patches/suggestions, being a developer or just by simply being an advocate. You get to know people, people that share your interests, people that may not even speak your language but still are avid to communicate and get the project into a better shape.
I owe a lot of gratitude to Glenn Vanderburg, his 16 hour TDD training session was an eye opener in many respects, a short time after I was making progress with a particular piece of code that was needed at that time (scratching my own itch) while at the same time thinking others may benefit from it (community), that is how Json-lib got started. After a while feedback started to pour in, even received messages from people that were trying to put Json-lib to work in ways I didn't think before, but most importantly I was getting feedback, all kinds of it. You can learn a lot from feedback (even negative ones), it pushes you to be a better developer.
As Kirill mentioned, community and the ability to learn (and be learned - (to teach means to be learned as well in many cultures)) from many sources are the reasons why I do open source.
Tagging now Eitan Suez, James E. Ervin, Danno Ferrin and Glen A. Smith, would love to know what's your take on this subject
