Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

Thomas Breitner has released his (German) thesis "Freie Software - Motivation und Engagement" which examines the motives of Free Software developers for working on Free Software.

It features a good historical introduction of the Free Software movement in general and discusses topics such as geeks, nerds, hacking etc. The main part is about the social aspects, though, especially motivation and commitment in the Free Software community.

The results of four interviews with famous Free Software developers are a major part of the thesis. There developers are:

• Werner Koch, author and maintainer of GnuPG and head of office of the Free Software Foundation Europe
• Martin Michlmayr, former Debian Project Leader
• Marco Schulze, CEO of NightLabs
• Harald Welte, head of the netfilter Core Team and GPL enforcing guru of gpl-violations.org fame

I'm through half of the thesis now and really recommend reading it, as it gives some interesting insights into the social aspects of Free Software development.

(via Harald Welte's blog)