Open source talent is scarce and in high demand, and employers are raising salaries and offering perks to entice qualified workers. But according to a survey from Dice and The Linux Foundation, only 2 percent of open source employees are doing it for the money.

Dice and The Linux Foundation have published the "2016 Open Source Jobs Report," based on a survey conducted in March 2016. It includes responses from more than 4,500 open source professionals and from more than 400 hiring managers at large enterprises as well as small and midsized businesses.

Seventy-nine percent of hiring managers say their companies have increased incentives to hold on to employees, with 44 percent hiking up salaries for open source talent more than in other parts of the company, and 43 percent offering more flexible work hours and telecommuting — all increases over the 2015 Linux Jobs Report (71 percent, 36 percent, and 37 percent, respectively).

Half of the open source employees surveyed were offered an incentive to keep them from switching jobs in the past year, while 73 percent were contacted by a recruiter at least once in the past six months.

But the report also found money and perks are the least likely reasons for professionals to seek an open source career. The top motivating factor is being able to work on interesting projects, followed by the ability to work with the most cutting-edge technologies, and collaborating with a global community.

In other findings from the report, of the hiring managers surveyed, 57 percent say they plan to bring in more open source professionals in 2016, compared to the previous year’s 44 percent.

Candidates with DevOps and application development expertise are the most sought-after, with 58 percent of hiring managers seeking DevOps talent and 60 percent seeking app developers.

Both open source professionals and hiring managers agree that proficiency with cloud technologies such as OpenStack are the most important open source skills, with about 50 percent of respondents in each group ranking these as the top skills.

However, beyond these cloud technologies, hiring managers and employees differ on the most important open source skills. While 21 percent of hiring managers report that networking knowledge is an important skill, only 9 percent of employees rank networking as the top skill. And that was almost reversed for containers, with 19 percent of employees ranking containers as most important, while only 8 percent of hiring managers report it as most important.