You should read the story of Denis Pushkarev, the guy behind core-js. His work basically props up half the modern JavaScript ecosystem and he barely got any money out of it. His post: https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/blob/master/docs/2023-02-14-so-whats-next.md
Jesus. That is just so wrong.
That’s why OSS is a saint but also a burden.
Create something for everybody, needs money to eat, tries to make a little bit of money of it, it’s not “free” anymore, people chooses something else.
Whoa, I couldn’t read it all but. That’s a modern tragedy
Remember the famous left pad incident? :D
I make my own coffees. Buy me a sammich.
Modern OSS is, sadly, just systematic exploitation of developers' passion and goodwill. I have stopped open sourcing anything beyond trivial things that solve one very specific problem as a form of protest. I used to work 8h / day and then do some 3-4 h / day of OSS contributing, then I got disillusioned.
While it's definitely true that open source props up infrastructure and isn't paid. On the other hand If you actively contribute to projects like that in your spare time or for a period any major company would pay far more to hire you. So if you want to monetise your skills you can easily on the back of that. If the question is money then these projects are a amazing way to earn tonnes In the future if you want too
Imagine depending on a bunch of nerds with no life. Natural 20 to the head.
IMHO, this is why GPL, AGPL, LGPL are better choices than using a license that corporations can, and will, abuse. I would rather make a project only three people in the entire world use, than a popular project used by every corporation on earth not giving back anything to society. But that's just me I guess.
GNU enthusiasts
FFMPEG
I just contribute to open source when I want to fix something I am working with. I’m not getting paid by the open source project but I am at work.
In reality most of them are already wealthy and just like coding, or they’re in Uni
*Not paid open source devs
Is unpaid not a grammatically correct word?
I'm not a native speaker, but I think "unpaid" has a connotation of "voluntary" / "honorary", where the "not paid" aspect is seen in a positive light. "Not paid" emphases on "no money" in a more negative sense, I think.
But this feels like hairsplitting. (And some native speaker needs to validate this idea anyway as I'm not sure I got this right.)
From Oxford dictionary:
Adjective: unpaid
1. (of a debt) not yet discharged by payment.
2. (of work or a period of leave) undertaken without payment.
2.1. (of a person) not receiving payment for work done.
No, unpaid means not paid and vice versa. Volunteer work is the phrase for unpaid work towards s charity or good cause.
open source is not an active job decision. its a decision to participate in a project voluntary. nothing more, nothing less. maybe you did it, because you like to code. maybe you wanted a challenge, who knows... but money should never be the motivation behind this.
Unless money is the reason behind this, and you add or updated core functions that are needed for your customer base which you now can show ads with this software and your contributions and knowledge regarding this software. Offering your Installation, management or support services.
Moq intensifies
If you use open source you have an obligation when you make fixes and changes for your company to push up changes as a contributor.
As such you can "work" a paid job and be making changes to an open source project and still be contributing. The work for your company on company time isn't mutually exclusive. This is how nearly all open source Apache contributions are made.
I know people like to think that all open source software is nerds in their mom's garage, but that's FAR from the truth.
Le pire c’est que c’est tellement vrai.
Stop posting this image ffs
LinuxKernelDevs
AFAIR most Linux Kernel Devs these days are employed and paid by various companies for their work on Linux.
Linux is more or less a multi-million dollar commercial project, payed almost exclusively by the big tech players.
And they have actually problems to find "new employees" as this whole "company" is extremely toxic: C botchers playing empire building, which makes almost everybody back out very quickly.
Linux is the only usable OS since years, but let's see how long this will remain sustainable given how this project works.
Oh it’ll be “usable” until there’s a viable alternative…
Linux isn’t an OS, it’s a kernel…
It's both actually. In everyday human speech you can definitely reference operating systems that run on the Linux kernel as "Linux" -- without being misunderstood.
Overloaded Linux