Even if you imagine software development to be generally fun, even the mundane, the rest of the workflow can be God awful boring. While Communism is a cool idea , it never works since you need incentives to motivate people.
Funny you say that because the most popular 3D printer firmwares are open source. Does QA’ing 3D printer firmware sound fun to you? No? Great well you don’t have to do that someone else is literally doing that right now because they thought it was fun.
By the way this is a decent job for an apprentice under supervision. It’s a good way to learn with minimal risk and young people are often willing to do this kind of thing. Then the veteran comes in and makes a few improvements to the QA system and hopefully it’s good for a while.
Nobody is QAing 3D printer firmware because they thought it would be fun. They are doing it because their printer crashed and now they can no longer print.
You can see man bugs were fixed in the latest release.
What may sound dreadful to you might be interesting for someone else.
While capitalism sounds nice in practice, it results in the destruction of the planet because the profit motive eats everything alive and leaves nothing behind for future generations.
The majority of those bug fixes are from people who probably were paid by companies to work on them.
A couple of people with a bunch of fixes attributed to them seem to work for Red Hat, and several contributors have Collabora email addresses. A fair bunch of fixes would seem to be from members of a LibreOffice team at some company (based on bugzilla comments and email addresses). One contributor seems to be from a company that does consulting related to LibreOffice.
A few fixes are from people registered with what look like private email addresses or with email addresses associated with the LibreOffice or other open source projects themselves. But they seem to be a minority.
That doesn't mean it can't be interesting to those people, or to many people, but it also doesn't mean most of the fixes were motivated by that alone.
(Also, fixing bugs is different than QA.)
> While capitalism sounds nice in practice, it results in the destruction of the planet because the profit motive eats everything alive and leaves nothing behind for future generations.
As always, that doesn't mean communism (or some other supposed polar opposite) would work. Or that those are the two possible binary options.
Even if you imagine software development to be generally fun, even the mundane, the rest of the workflow can be God awful boring. While Communism is a cool idea , it never works since you need incentives to motivate people.