HBS Working Knowledge has an interview with Siobhn O’Mahony who discusses her research on foundations formed around three projects: Debian, GNOME and Apache. Some excerpts:
The hacker culture prizes autonomy and self-determination. Eric Raymond defines hackers as those who love programming for the sake of doing it, for the sake of obsessively solving a problem. Thus, hackers who contribute to the open source community are often intrinsically motivated.
[The] emphasis on demonstration of capabilities is even more critical in the open source community. One earns the respect of peers by demonstrating skills and making valuable contributions of code to a project.
Associated with these values is an embrace of informality and distaste for “administrivia”for this too can take away from the pure joy of programming.
