Oversimplifications in HtN

[Richard Stallman]

    I think you can safely read Eric as claiming that hackers behave
    *as if* they were motivated by the reputation game.

If that is what Eric means, he should say that.  If his intention is
only to propose phenomenological theories of patterns of events, he
should make that clear in his papers.  As now written, they talk about
how we think, and make recommendations about how people ought to think.

Even as a phenomenological theory, though, that one is only partially
right.  The GNU/Linux operating system is a major part of the free
software community, and it exists principally because of a project
whose motivation and action did not fit that theory.  The GNU
Project's motivation was political idealism, and we set the goal of
making a complete free operating system because of the political good
it would do.

Then we worked hard on this goal, even hiring people to do jobs that
wouldn't contribute much to anyone's reputation, but were important
for achieving the goal.

I've seen several motivations for working on free software, including

* Political idealism.
* Desire for reputation.
* Joy of hacking.
* Scratching a personal itch.
* Profit.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were others, too.