> I've never understood software engineers and organisations who contribute their code to the open source and free software worlds and then think they're owed c

> I've never understood software engineers and organisations who contribute their code to the open source and free software worlds and then think they're owed compensation for it. It's obvious isn't it? The logic goes "I need to eat" + "I develop open source software" => "I need to be paid for developing open source software". The only problem with it is the world then live in doesn't support their implied version of the "=>" operator. People fall into this trap all the time. "Men like porn" + "Men like sex" => "Porn turns men into sex addicts". "Criminals commit crime" + "Jailing criminals stops them committing crime" => "We will be better off it we spend a lot of money on keeping criminals in jail". Taking the time to understand the underlying mechanism that drives open source takes effort. Yes, it started when people scratched itches when they had nothing better to and gave away the result for free. If you have a certain mind set giving it away for free is the natural thing to do. A true idealist might try dedicating their life to it, but find it is very difficult as they have to eat. Most of us acknowledge that reality and move on. After moving on some of us found to our delight that it made business sense in the places we worked in to give away some our work for free. This wasn't because we convinced business to share our ideals at their expense. It happened because we brought open source into the business. The business then discovered it was pure (if perhaps enlightened) pragmatism to let us give away some of our work, because the business got far more back from the ecosystem than they contributed; mostly because contributing the work they were going to pay us to do anyway costs almost nothing and as a lot of other businesses are doing the same thing, it amplified that feed back effect. Combine that with copyleft licences like the GPL providing a way to keep parasites under control so we could avoid the tragedy of the commons, and business found they too can be part of a wonderful virtuous cycle. This is the mechanism that drives most of open source development today. Since open source has eaten the world I'd say it's been very successful. But nonetheless not all of us get to participate. If you didn't find such a place to work then most of your open source efforts mostly died because worshipping ideals doesn't put food on the plate. Such is life. Accept it and move on. But if you are both stubborn and idealistic it can take a while to realise you don't have a lot of choice in this. Asking people to pay for your open source software is a stop along the path to discovering your simplistic "=>" operator doesn't and will never exist in the real world, no matter how much you want it to.