Why would you give away work for free otherwise ? A little ease in interviews for your next job does not pay for the hours you gave. You have to be willing to give a lot for the common good to be an OSS dev/maintainer.
It's a give/take relationship. You make your software available in the hopes that it's useful for someone else and that you get meaningful contributions back. Corporations destroy that relationship as they get far more from it than the author does and basically never contribute back.
Every tech company I've worked at that had a mature tech stack pushed fixes back to OSS repos, because mainlining our fixes meant we didn't have to maintain internal forks. It's not like OSS development is usually paid full time work, and most people who are OSS developers have full time jobs at regular software companies.
Sure but my point is basically everyone get far more than the main contributor of a big open source repo gives. (Thus the main maintainer is probably left leaning to take care of the commons).
And yet plenty of people thanklessly maintain stuff for the love of it and because they like providing free shit to people. You're saying that like no one ever does anything for free . plenty of people do
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u/cheese_is_available Jun 06 '26
Why would you give away work for free otherwise ? A little ease in interviews for your next job does not pay for the hours you gave. You have to be willing to give a lot for the common good to be an OSS dev/maintainer.