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Being an open source developer these days is horrible. It used to be a strategy whereby you would forego profits in exchange for social recognition. These days

Being an open source developer these days is horrible. It used to be a strategy whereby you would forego profits in exchange for social recognition. These days there is no meat left in it. You give up all your time and you get neither profits nor recognition. Writing blog posts is much more effective. My tech blog gets a steady 200 visitors per day (assuming that I don't post anything new for 1 month) and often reaches 10K to 20K visitors on the day when I post something new. 200 visitors a day is the about the same number of visitors that my open source project website gets each day (traffic spikes are very rare)... The time and effort it took me to write the blog is less than 1% of what I put in for my open source project.

ensiferum 9y ago
Mostly whatever you do these days gets you neither profit or recognition. If your blog gets 10k visits you're in the select few from the thousands of bloggers who don't get that many visitors combined. Nothing is worth doing anymore cause nobody will care and being seen or heard even if you do bring something to the table is for all practical matters impossible.
- jononor 9y ago
  10k people is a lot of people. An good sized football stadium. If they walked by you one by one on the way out, each spending 1 second, it would take nearly 3 hours. To provide a small service and affect so many people per year is great. Not everything needs to change the entire world.
bitL 9y ago
I really think open source has lost the fight, generosity doesn't seem to be rewarded at all these days, and it enabled all kinds of freaks never able to do anything worthy on their own to profit from it and poison the well for everyone. For me moving forward it means my open source code will be always dual licensed - Affero GPL3 + expensive commercial license, no BSD/MIT etc. I don't see any other way forward.
js8 9y ago
Maybe it's really because there are so many different people doing open source, people cannot keep track of those contributions?
- jondubois 9y ago
  That's partially true, Open Source can be very competitive. Especially now with big corporations getting involved. I think it's actually a bit of a problem. Open Source used to be a refuge for indie developers. Now it's mostly dominated by big corporations. Now it feels like you can't really make a difference in open source (or anywhere else) unless you join Facebook, Google, Microsoft or some other mega-corp.

ensiferum 9y ago

Mostly whatever you do these days gets you neither profit or recognition. If your blog gets 10k visits you're in the select few from the thousands of bloggers who don't get that many visitors combined. Nothing is worth doing anymore cause nobody will care and being seen or heard even if you do bring something to the table is for all practical matters impossible.

jononor 9y ago
10k people is a lot of people. An good sized football stadium. If they walked by you one by one on the way out, each spending 1 second, it would take nearly 3 hours. To provide a small service and affect so many people per year is great. Not everything needs to change the entire world.

bitL 9y ago

I really think open source has lost the fight, generosity doesn't seem to be rewarded at all these days, and it enabled all kinds of freaks never able to do anything worthy on their own to profit from it and poison the well for everyone. For me moving forward it means my open source code will be always dual licensed - Affero GPL3 + expensive commercial license, no BSD/MIT etc. I don't see any other way forward.

js8 9y ago

Maybe it's really because there are so many different people doing open source, people cannot keep track of those contributions?

jondubois 9y ago
That's partially true, Open Source can be very competitive. Especially now with big corporations getting involved. I think it's actually a bit of a problem. Open Source used to be a refuge for indie developers. Now it's mostly dominated by big corporations. Now it feels like you can't really make a difference in open source (or anywhere else) unless you join Facebook, Google, Microsoft or some other mega-corp.