So first off, a warm welcome to all of you, and thanks for joining the list. As you may well suspect, this list partially exists due to self-interest, but I think it could also become a valuable resource to those of use interested in linking Debian to academia. I hope we will share some fruitful and interesting discussions. Let me start off with a question: you all probably know ESR's and all the others' treatments about why F/OSS developers do their thing. Heller & Fitzgerald provide an excellent model for it in _Understanding Open Source Software Development_. I am missing one motivation though, and I cannot find any literature on it: the sense of power. This is maybe less often found in traditional F/OSS projects, but I think it exists in Debian in quite a few places. For instance, a package maintainer may be driven to donate time to the project because of the sense of power maintaining the package gives to him/her. This can be an altruistic sense of power, because just being in power can be a kick. Or it can be a malicious one, culminating in refusing to address a wishlist or fix a certain bug. Similarly, I think the situation we are seeing with the various "cabal" teams may also fall under this category. Do you know of any literature I should look up on this topic? Do you have any thoughts on this matter? Thanks. PS: at one point it may be interesting for posters here to identify themselves, and give a short introduction, so that we know what everyone else is doing wrt academic Debian... -- Please do not send copies of list mail to me; I read the list! .''`. martin f. krafft <madduck@debian.org> : :' : proud Debian developer and author: http://debiansystem.info `. `'` `- Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing a system
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