What motivates you?

[jaspalex]

Hope you don't mind if I quote you on that one, Pancake

As for the quotes, I would personally ask you whether you like to remain anonymous or be  mentioned with name, robtillaart!

Will also probably ask in some other forum for some help for a personal project that can help me illustrate what Arduino is, for the defense of my thesis.

If anyone still has ideas concerning what motivates you, keep it coming! Thanks!

[robtillaart]

As for the quotes, I would personally ask you whether you like to remain anonymous or be  mentioned with name, robtillaart!

you are hereby granted to use my quotes with name mentioned in this thread before this post.

Can you post your thesis.pdf here when it is ready?

[JChristensen]

I've always found that it's very rewarding and fun to create and build my own designs, and usually see them work as intended. I like problem solving (my wife might question that while I'm doing it) and also helping folks out when I can.

Given those motivations, open source is sort of icing on the cake for me.  But that is not to minimize its importance, because it's a big enabler for a lot of things including information sharing and community-building like this Arduino forum. There are a lot of impressive folks here that really know their stuff and are willing to share their knowledge and assist others with their projects. Indeed, open source has fostered an entire ecosystem that runs from hobbyists to small businesses, to distributors and service providers. As testimony to the importance of the open source movement, many large companies, including semiconductor manufacturers, have taken notice and become actively involved.

[jaspalex]

Thanks, robtillaart, and I will surely upload the pdf once done. Actually, I am soon also going to publish a questionnaire developed especially at the Arduino community - so I hope to get some input from the community there which might verify my hypotheses.

Jack, great to hear another point of view - I am especially interested in your point of view of open source as icing on top of the cake. Often times open source is seen as equivalent with free software (not only meaning at a zero price but more from a philosophical standpoint), so I would be wondering if you had a different opinion if this forum (or the community as a whole) would be sponsored or even governed by a profit-seeking corporation? Which is especially interesting, as large corporations paradoxically(?) nowadays invest a lot in open source… Did you mean Intel in your example?

And I can't stress it enough but it is great to get this personal feedback from the forum, it really helps a great deal in understanding the dynamics of how things work here (and that's very positive!), thanks!

[jaspalex]

As promised, here is the link the survey:
Click here to access the survey!
I am very grateful for every response, the more the merrier

[AWOL]

For me, it's the free booze and Arduino groupies.

[Coding Badly]

I'm with ya' brother!