About Motivation

I was putting together ideas for my talk at conf.kde.in about practical ways to contributing to KDE-Edu. In the process I was trying to list "qualities" that might be useful for new potential contributors and I was asking myself "what is the motivation for other people to contribute to KDE? what is my motivation?"

My personal motivation changed over time. At first when installing my first Red Hat I did not realize the freedom part, the technical challenge of installing and running it appealed to me. Then I understood a bit that it was all done for free over the internet. After playing with stuff I found KDE the desktop that I was comfortable with, I sticked to it. So I started translating to French and that helped me improving my English (I happened to live in England and not speaking well at all). I was motivated by learning new things mostly for myself (so it was very self-centered), the idea of giving something was weakly perceived at that time.

After that I ran into an article about KDevelop and started putting together a Memory game. The article mentioned IRC which I had never used and when I went there in some KDE channels, I met the community and the passion began. I immediately felt at ease and welcomed (I think it has to be 2 sided in order to succeed, the willing from me and the reception from the community, as in contributing to any real life group). I was a total newbie and fell in all traps a newbie can fall in (I found back my first commits to CVS and I committed built files for example ;-)) but this is quite natural and strong peer help makes this learning process easier. The years before I was doing math courses by correspondence with a French University, that was before the internet and working alone to do a master in mathematics was not easy at all. I only got half of it ;-)

I got carried away by telling you my "debuts" but, to cut it short, now KDE has become a passion (not an addiction though as my life is primarily led by my family) and I welcome the intellectual challenge of constantly learning new things. I give and I receive.

What about your motivation?