The Source of Success

                The kinds of people that contribute to open-source software are the reason for its success. They self-motivate by definition; they start off contributing without compensation during their own free time. With this volunteer mentality also comes an inherent interest in the project they are working on, they chose to work on it in the first place. This interest not only fuels quality work, it encourages interaction with other contributors and gets them sharing and seeing many different styles of programming. Often sharing work in this way takes a thick skin when a contributor sees just how horrible their programming was, but this only encourages further improvement when taken the right way. Without programmers like these, Open source software would be dead.