“Open source soft­ware devel­op­ment is the ulti­mate self-service indus­try”, says Jeff Atwood in an arti­cle look­ing at pos­si­ble rea­sons for the OpenOffice.org project’s dwin­dling devel­op­ment com­mu­nity. How­ever, it’s Atwood’s thoughts on self ser­vice super­mar­ket check­outs that I found most interesting:

What fas­ci­nates me about self-service check­out devices is that the store is mak­ing you do work they would nor­mally pay their employ­ees to do. Think about this for a minute. You’re play­ing the role of the pay­ing cus­tomer and the cashier employee. Under the watch­ful eyes of secu­rity cam­eras and at least one human mon­i­tor, nat­u­rally, but still. We con­tinue to check our­selves out. Not only will­ingly, but enthu­si­as­ti­cally. For that one brief moment, we’re work­ing for the super­mar­ket at the low­est pos­si­ble pay scale: none.

That’s the para­dox of self-checkout. But to me it’s no rid­dle at all: nobody else in that store cares about get­ting Jeff Atwood checked out nearly as much as Jeff Atwood does.

On the topic of open source devel­op­ment com­mu­ni­ties, I also found this quote to be quite poignant:

If you’re hav­ing dif­fi­culty get­ting soft­ware devel­op­ers to par­tic­i­pate in your open source project, I’d say the com­mu­nity isn’t fail­ing your project. Your project is fail­ing the community.