Regarding the money thing, remember there are other currencies than dollars. When I open sourced my own RSS reader[1] some of the "non-monetary currencies" I r

Regarding the money thing, remember there are other currencies than dollars. When I open sourced my own RSS reader[1] some of the "non-monetary currencies" I received: * Several (non-robot) recruitment emails from well-known companies doing Ruby * Additional development time from strangers to fix things I wasn't interested in doing (i18n, performance improvements) * Additional testing time to iron out all the bugs * 50-100 "qualified followers" (i.e. other developers/designers) on Twitter, many thanking me for creating the project - increasing my network reach * Five people have sent me messages that their merged pull requests were there first open source contributions - that feels really cool * Links from two of my favorite blogs - OneThingWell and The Changelog * Being referenced in a Ruby book written by a community leader * Socially-validated (1.8k+ stars) open source project that I can forever point to * Material for future blog posts, user group/conference talks Not all of these have the same value to each person - but for me, they were worth the trade-off. Could I have charged for the software instead? Probably, but I have a day job that pays me well and I enjoy. I wrote the software because I wanted it to exist (one of my favorite things about being a developer) and any extra benefits are just icing on the cake. [1]: https://github.com/swanson/stringer https://github.com/swanson/stringer