Fun and Software Development

This study gathered 1330 answers about fun and software development from open source developers as well as 114 answers from programmers working in commercial software projects. The analysis of these data proves that fun plays an important role when software developers decide to get engaged in an open source project. Moreover, the comparison of the answers gives evidence for the hypothesis that programming in an open source project is significantly more fun compared to the same activity under commercial conditions. The reasons for this fact are that open source projects are able to attract software developers with a credible project vision and that they can offer them an optimal challenge.