What motivates people in large academic software projects?

What motivates people who are working on projects such as LiquidPub? Do they want to create a successful platform that will be used by many researchers, or is their main aim research, or even just attracting the funding that helps them at creating publishable, 'solid', papers?

The latter seems to be the objective. And this should not be a surprise if we look at where the incentives are: As for career advancement non-liquid journal-publications will matter most, especially for others than the project-founders, and maybe even for them.

This because if LiquidPub fails to become a working platform, and thus no highly ranked publisher or journal will take it up, the publications are still there. It is like a safety track, next to the risky one of trying to build usable software, and one which may be more attractive.

An additional factor is that many people working on large academic software-projects are primarily researchers, interested in specific aspects of the project only, such as ranking or peer-review. I could even imagine that some participants in large academic software projects would be unmoved by whether the project as a whole will succeed.

Thus, with sad irony we might remark that the importance of solid papers might very well be what will freeze the great visions of LiquidPub, and similar projects.