What is your motivation for doing free stuff?

Answer 1

Honestly it started out as to increase my knowledge and it just would be nice and moved more and more to reputation and part of my job as I got older?

Answer 2

I've released several things free, and mostly did it as a "thanks" to the community, often because I'd learned something cool, revised it and improved it, and didn't feel right charging for it. In my case, it was mostly toolkits, and I released them as either public domain or freeware rather than open source.

In one case, I released it (coincidentally) just as someone else was releasing a commercial system that did the same thing (and less well). I wrote him a personal letter to apologize because I felt bad. :-)

It does, as a side effect, increase your reputation within the community, assuming it's something useful and interesting, but I never saw that as a goal.

Answer 3

There are several reasons for doing any job, paid or not:

• money
• contacts
• experience
• fun

Doing free stuff gives you more options on #2-#4.

Answer 4

Increase my knowledge and fun.

I've hosted a site for 9 years for free. I'm still hosting it even though the game has lost interest (I'm still getting about 5 gig a month of downloads). The sites are for Motocross Madness 1, 2, and MX vs ATV for the PC. (http://twisteddirt.com and http://dirttwister.com)

We did a lot of work for free, but I really learned a lot on manipulating images and 3D objects.

Answer 5

Mainly I enjoy doing free stuff (like wasting all my time on Stack Overflow) but also, I like to think I'm helping improve the overall quality of the code being put into the wild (even if it's just a small improvement)

Generally, I think we work in an industry where there is very little (actually it's more like no) regulation or standards (I've blogged about this before) and there are a lot of people that get a free ride because of other people's ignorance.

The number of "enterprise" access databases I've seen or "enterprise" CRM's built on static HTML and charged out at tens of thousands of dollars just annoys the crap out of me so I'm more than happy to help businesses and basically act as a BS detector to help save them some dollars in the long run.

Part of doing this is educating them and I can only really help educate them by educating myself and if I had to pay to learn about all the stuff that I learn about from sites like SO I don't think I'd get much learning done at all.

So to come full circle, I spend a lot of time learning from sites like SO, so when I see a question that I can answer, or at least contribute to, I like to think that I'm returning some of the value I've received.

Answer 6

I do projects for experience and self improvement

Answer 7

Creating "things" is just too much fun to get paid sometimes.

Answer 8

'Cause the chicks dig it.

Answer 9

There is also the plain sake of building up knowledge, transform it and consuming the results!

I like to do to a lot of lectures just as well to help up organize groups and efforts.

• While doing lectures I learn a lot: I dig for knowledge, chew it, digest it, and finally add some of my own experience and make it available for others to do the same on their on cycles. It's amazing been able to inspire people with your thoughts and knowledge.

• While organizing I learn from people, socialize and most of the time end up changing my own self. It's amazing how much can little things affect the way you see life!

But on the other hand, just as a mentor told me a couple of weeks ago, things are as free as a puppy... there always gonna be a price in things you get, either egotistical or plain satisfactory and for such you will got to sweat a bit to earn it.

Cheers!

Answer 10

I develop a lot of small tools for myself (i think that applies for almost every developer). As some of these tools may be really useful but since I do not want to deal with the business side (as soon as you start to sell stuff, you have to do customer service and have to worry about bugs/guarantee and all sorts of legal bull...t), i just put them up for download. Possibly it's a bit for reputation, but also to learn stuff i.e. how to write Documentation and make UIs that other people can actually use (yes, those interfaces with 3 Buttons named Button1 to Button3 are really good enough for my own usage, but not really something i'd like to release)

Answer 11

Because I want to do something cool, but don't want to spend one single second thinking about marketing or business plans.

Answer 12

I believe the best way to learn is jump in and do it. I have found soooo much help from the internet. I graduated from University with a B.Sc. in Physics. The only computer course I took was "Programming in C" in which I failed, it was not interesting, probably because I did not make it interesting.

I am now a Web Developer. I can program in PHP, VB.NET, C#.NET, JavaScript and some Java. I learned it all on my own from books and mostly from the net. Just recently I have enrolled in a VB.NET course that I currently have like 99% (missed some colons on labels) thanks to great resources. Edit: My final score on the course was 98% - not bad.

StackOverflow is great. I love it because of its community, its speed and style. I love the readability, there are many good web resources that just do not look good). They disregard fonts (size, color, family), line-height, spacing, margins and padding (thank goodness for Stylish!)

So, to answer the question: I wish to give back to the community that has helped me establish myself in a relatively high demand industry. Also, I find that asking a question properly forces me to organize my thoughts and document them - which sometimes brings up new questions / problems that were not thought of OR solves the problem!

Answer 13

Barter. I had a neighbor who needed computer help and her husband had a welder. Match made in heaven.