I’d argue getting a shirt for some PRs is better than the status quo, where you get nothing for a PR.
Which just goes to show how bad the status quo is.
Which just goes to show how bad the status quo is.
You already got payment up front: software that the author(s) have made available to you for free.
You get payment by the author spending time to review your changes.
You also get payment afterward: free maintenance for your pet feature. (Not guaranteed of course but generally the case.)
Be very careful assuming that a payment motivates open source developers. If you offered to help me do something for an hour for whatever internal motivation you might have, and afterwards I offer you $5 for your time, you would likely be demotivated.
On the other hand if you offered to buy them a beer or a coffee it would probably be very motivating. I'm not sure why this is. Maybe cash just feels lazy and impersonal, so the amount being offered has to be big enough to counter that feeling.
That is certainly a plus, but I don't think that's all of it. If I was working on something for a friend, that they had no idea how to help with. Then at some point they dropped off a snack or drink as a thank you, I would be happy about that. If they offered me a $100 bill I would be offended because they're not my boss, and my time is worth more than that.
I want to say that a small token of appreciation feels better than having my value quantified to an insulting amount. However, it may be even more basic than that. Food is a powerful reward, there is a reason it is used to train animals. It also could be that introducing money makes something feel like an obligation.
For anyone who is working, people are "giving" them $5 all the time. But they probably don't have people buying them coffee/beer/lunch all the time.
here is the work that you cited if i am not wrong.
"Volunteer work is an increasingly large, yet ill-understood sector of the economy. We show that monetary rewards undermine the intrinsic motivation of volunteers."
-- https://ideas.repec.org/p/zur/iewwpx/007.html
The earlier sentence make it clear they are talking about monetary rewards specifically, not any kind of reward. A t-shirt might notionally have a $ value, but it is not a monetary reward. Plus, the nature of a branded t-shirt has an obvious team-participation / prestige value.
If rewards demotivate people, we should also avoid positive recognition, or praise, which is a form of reward; of course this is unintuitive, so I assume monetary rewards are a special case.
We all hear the stories of the person who saves a company a million dollars, and then gets giving a coffee cup (or an attaboy) for recognition.
It gets even trickier when the giver and the receiver have wildly different incomes.
Generally I find money to be a terrible proxy for what I actually value, but other options are worse proxies!
Good PRs are valuable, but require lots of work. Spam is not valuable, but it also does not require basically any work.
Hacktoberfest equally rewards both good PRs and spam equally. With those incentives, what are people logically going to produce?
Well, the answer is clearly "a lot of people," unless you can think of an alternate explanation for the increase is spam during Hacktober.
Why they want a damn T-Shirt so much is a totally valid question, though. I don't understand that either.
In both cases I get that what I care about gets into the project. It's enough for me.