Open source projects and why they are used

Now that I’ve walked through the what of open source along with its historical roots and how open source is used, to complete The Golden Circle [3], let’s look at the why of open source.

I heard Alan Clark of SUSE once describe open source as “the ultimate scratch-your-own-itch model,” meaning that participation is tied to whatever motivates the participant. As you can imagine, this makes the steering of an open source project challenging (another topic we will dig more into in later chapters, covering governance, bringing in new contributors, and growing contributors into maintainers in Chapter 5, Governance and Hosting Models). Still, it also makes answering the why open source question not one with a clear, universal answer.

The best way to answer the why is by looking at a few projects and understanding the motivations of those communities. Let’s take a look at some that hopefully will give you...