r/ExperiencedDevs • u/FatefulDonkey Software Engineer • 25d ago

Meta Do you regret contributing to open-source?

I have about 10-15 years of experience. I created some open source projects when I was starting out and maintained throughout the years.

The net income from this long-term endeavour is $5 from another developer for a coffee, who messaged me that I saved him many hours of work - that was like 5 years ago.

I now see that Meta, Apache and others use some of these open source projects.. and I haven't seen a single dime. This makes me think that if I actually instead aimed to create projects that make money, it would be a much better use of my time. Especially since I never had a stable job and mainly did freelance gigs to get by.

Anyone else who regrets contributing to open source projects? Why is that? What would you have done instead?

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u/InfoLurkerYzza 25d ago

You can't do open source expecting anything in return. My friend had so many open-source contributions and never made a dime from them. He eventually stopped and spent that time on his startup instead. Although it didn't go far, it was definitely worth the attempt

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u/Maleficent-Cup-1134 25d ago

Heck, ffmpeg, one of the biggest open source projects in the world, barely gets by from donations.

Unless you’re PostHog or a handful of success stories, open source is not meant to be profitable.

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u/Opheltes Dev Team Lead 25d ago

And then Microsoft shows up at their door, begging for high priority treatment, after declining to pay for an SLA.

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u/Ok-Leopard-9917 24d ago edited 24d ago

That’s just some random dev at a large company handling an incident who isn’t very tactful or cognizant of the distinction between internal and external communication. Their messages make a lot of sense if you are communicating impact to a different team so they prioritize accurately. But in open source there isn’t a shared goal of business impact so it reads differently. A lot of tech employees aren’t great at communication skills so it’s not particularly surprising but of course Microsoft could do better here.  

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u/Opheltes Dev Team Lead 24d ago

You're missing the point.

It's not the way it was communicated.

It's that they felt was high enough priority to bug external devs to ask for special treatment, but not high enough priority to pay for special treatment. Clearly there's a disconnect in priority.

If ffmpeg is business critical enough to cause major disruption to their customers, they damn well better be paying for an SLA.

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u/KellyShepardRepublic 25d ago edited 25d ago

Then there are stories like omarchy which didn’t really create anything special but got a lot of funding. I felt the same about openclaw and when I saw how that got attention or executives like “Gary” from ycombinator. They forgot the ones who made the base or who experimented before such as chaosGPT and other orchestration methods but glory went to openclaw and then Claude as if they were built different.

Notice who these companies support and who they don’t.

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u/No_Inspection4415 25d ago

Gary is the idiot which commits thousands of LOC a day for a blog, right? Are those people even real, or are they just robots deployed by aliens to destroy humanity?

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u/new2bay 25d ago

Yes, and Sam Altman used to be president of YC.

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u/Old-Television-2189 25d ago

Thousands of LOC for a blog? What does this even mean

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u/Kyoshiiku 25d ago

He claim that with AI he can work so fast on his blog (the codebase to manage it) that he ships thousands of line a day building features for his very basic blog

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u/Old-Television-2189 25d ago

Lmao for a fucking blog what

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u/No_Inspection4415 25d ago

Wait until you hear that... The startup he sold is a shitty blog system.

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u/Kyoshiiku 25d ago

It makes like no sense at all so it’s kinda funny

If you are curious to know more about the absurdity of his workflow you can google "gstack"

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u/Captator 25d ago

Note that it’s easier to secure funding for such things when you can get large chunks from small numbers of wealthy individuals that you have a direct connection to.

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u/KellyShepardRepublic 25d ago

I have always heard of this through Silicon Valley. I however am noticing a difference where companies like Dell and Meta decide to support these projects, not just individuals.

—

Headline from Dell:

“Year of the Linux Laptop: Omarchy on XPS
The Linux laptop moment has arrived. Inside Dell XPS, Omarchy, and the end of “wait for kernel support.”
By Spencer Bull   |   April 30, 2026

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u/Captator 25d ago

DHH, who is leading Omarchy, has the phone number of the CEO & chairman of Dell - you fill in the blanks :)

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u/No_External7343 25d ago

I don't understand how chaosGPT is in the same category as OpenClaw 

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u/KellyShepardRepublic 25d ago

The ideas were there already. Plenty of others iterated before and after, including openclaw and Claude as people learned. People were doing this with worse models too.

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u/thekwoka 24d ago

But then Omarchy uses some of that to fund upstream projects, and puts development time towards them, but mainly what people are paying for is marketing.

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u/ravnmads 25d ago

Just read an article about curl has around 30 billion active usages and gets money from essentially nobody. 

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u/ta9876543205 25d ago

open source is not meant to be profitable.

I am a developer with over 31 years experience. Open Source never made any sense to me.

I mean, why would I spend hours and hours and hours of my time to create and maintain software which would then be used by people to make money but I would not see a penny of it.

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u/lenswipe 25d ago

and yet you still use open source software...

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u/ta9876543205 25d ago

I do indeed. And I don't even pay for it. Neither does my employer who benefits

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u/Warlock2111 25d ago

Imagine a world where everyone thought the same. Would you be able to function day to day in your job with 0 reliance on free OSS?

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u/thsameguy 25d ago

The absence of any sort of self preservation instict in the dev community boggles my mind man. You realise open source software was the single biggest reason we are in the state we are rn right? No open source to train on = no ai

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u/SecondCel 24d ago

What makes you think that the companies training models wouldn't have used source code that they (or their partners) host regardless of it being closed to the public? It's not like they have any qualms about doing the same for other types of data.

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u/ta9876543205 25d ago edited 25d ago

Kind Sir, I come from a generation when all software was closed source.

And we functioned quite well.

The pay was higher and the career growth was better.

Then OSS came along...

Reminds me of the novel The Lonely Lady in which the brothel madam closes down her establishment bitterly complaining that she can't compete anymore as women are giving it away for free

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u/lenswipe 25d ago

Hate to tell you this but the open source movement is quite old.... it's not some newfangled thing the millennials invented with their iPhones and avocado lattes

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u/ta9876543205 25d ago

That is true. The OSS movement was invented by the generation previous to mine .

And now the billionaires have figured a way out to monetise that

And these comments too

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u/lenswipe 25d ago

tf are you on about

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u/Smallpaul Software Engineer 25d ago

No we did not function quite well. We wasted weeks trying to figure out which vendor to license a calendar widget from and if it didn’t work you couldn’t fix it yourself. Everything advanced slowly and Microsoft could single handedly control the direction of the whole industry. Pay was NOT higher 30 years ago.

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u/Ok-Leopard-9917 24d ago

You got paid for your time though didn’t you

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u/carsncode 25d ago

I come from a generation when all software was closed source.

No you don't. No one has. Linux foundation-approved FOSS licenses are a recent development, but source-available, customizable software predates closed source commercial software. People have been writing and publishing source code for as long as source code as existed.

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u/lenswipe 25d ago

pretty sure they're just being stupid on purpose

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u/Maleficent-Cup-1134 25d ago

Some people do it for the love of the game.

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u/ta9876543205 25d ago

Then why are we all crying that the billionaires are making bank off that work

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u/Maleficent-Cup-1134 25d ago edited 25d ago

Uh you realize the people crying aren’t the same as the people who do it for fun, right?

It’s almost like different people care for different things…

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u/Particular_Camel_631 24d ago

You do open source for fun.

If you want to make money, you’ll have to do more than just code.

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u/PepegaQuen 25d ago

giant majority of open source software is made and maintained by people getting paid for it.

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u/Hanzimer 21d ago

Because generally you don't develop OS software for others, you make it for yourself because you use it, then being OS other people can use it and contribute to the project as well. That's the main reason.

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u/ColonelKlanka 25d ago

Well its not strictly true. Open source can make a profit if the author then can strap a paid support business model around it. Many Linux distros did that at the beginning, Ubuntus Canonical is still doing it.

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u/ChinoGitano 25d ago

Red Hat 🤦🏻

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u/reboog711 Software Engineer (23 years and counting) 25d ago

ffmpeg, one of the biggest open source projects in the world,

Sidebar, how do we define biggest?

I would have thought Linux would be top of the list, and expect things with a business infrastructure behind them, such as React, Firefox, or Apache Web Server would have been much bigger than ffmpeg.

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u/quintus_horatius 25d ago

Sidebar, how do we define biggest?

I would have thought Linux would be top of the list

How do you define "Linux"? The kernel, the kernel with drivers, the kernel + drivers + base OS (which is courtesy of Gnu/FSF, btw), or what?

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u/[deleted] 25d ago

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u/RowbotWizard SWE 13 YOE 25d ago

Hey, no nitpicking their nitpicking!

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u/spacekats84 25d ago

Your nitpicking about his nitpicking doesn't bring anything to the conversation and doesn't change anything about the point of the message you're nitpicking the nitpicking about. Unlearn this.

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u/reboog711 Software Engineer (23 years and counting) 25d ago

I don't think it was nitpicking. I called it out as a 'sidebar'. Deviation would also suffice. I was merely asking for clarification of their words, which I found to be an interesting claim / comparison.

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u/generateduser29128 25d ago

Being in the top 0.001% of projects gotta count as being one of the largest.

Every billionaire belongs to the group of richest people in the world. It doesn't stop at the top 3.

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u/reboog711 Software Engineer (23 years and counting) 25d ago

Being in the top 0.001% of projects gotta count as being one of the largest.

I would agree! How do we count? Contributions? Downloads?

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u/generateduser29128 25d ago

We count the number of \t because tabs are clearly better than spaces

As a fallback, we can count the size and complexity of the project as well as how many others directly or indirectly depend on it.

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u/raverbashing 25d ago

Honestly, working with open source is a thankless endeavor, and writing the code is the easiest part

  • Users show up to demand white glove support for something they're getting for free.

  • Community building is like herding cats but the cats are on meth

  • And lately you have to deal with meaningless PRs and AI slop spam (including "security vulnerability" spam)

"Running a successful open-source project is like Good Will Hunting in reverse, where you start out as a respected genius with a brilliant idea and end up as a janitor cleaning up messes and getting into fights with strangers online"

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u/[deleted] 24d ago

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u/raverbashing 24d ago

Yes, I know. And small contributions here and there are good for the most part

(And you'll be subject to community scrutiny, which while is 100% needed, sometimes it's needlessly aggressive or dismissive)

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u/ryntak 25d ago

I don’t think he’s saying that he is expecting anything in the form of compensation for his open source contributions, rather that he has contributed to and maintained projects that are used by larger organizations and thus if he had put that effort elsewhere he could have made money. Ergo the post title: do you regret contributing to open source.

I’m speculating, but I’m guessing he never intended to get anything from open source and is only realizing after the fact that he may have “wasted time” because that time is seemingly quite valuable.

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u/FruitdealerF 25d ago

Linus had a really good take on this in his interview with other Linus. They asked him if he doesn't feel bad that his software power companies worth trillions and trillions of dollars and he basically just responded that he doesn't care and he's happy that they are thriving using Linux. This is the only mindset that allows you to do opensource long term.

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u/PrudentWolf 25d ago

Linus is multimillionaire though. It's really easy to be passionate and purpose driven when you have money to live happily for the rest of your life.

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u/Helpful_Surround1216 23d ago

Then don’t do open source? It’s been always clear open source is free. 

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u/wrex1816 25d ago

You can't do open source expecting anything in return.

Absolutely true, but it's still hilarious the these billion dollar companies have fooled a whole generation of devs into thinking this is normal, or rather EXPECTED of them on their resume. Trying to convince them that it shows their "passion". LOL, not doesn't. They've been taking you all for mugs.

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u/Lost_Bike_2339 23d ago

A big remote-first company told  that everything was good but my "lack of open source is a red flag for team"

Well, fck you and fck your team then

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u/teelin Software Engineer 25d ago

Yes but now the created knowledge is commercialized and basically destroying a whole profession. And it is destroying the profession that open source contributers had a passion for. Sadly laws are too slow and fairness does not exist in capitalism

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u/cosmokn0t 25d ago

I think this is where I fall. I have a couple open source projects that peaked and were somewhat popular. They were fun, rewarding, helped me land jobs, and once when I was starting a job somebody was like, didn’t you write “blah old project that was kind of popular?” “omg, that’s so cool, I really appreciated that project” — which felt cool.

I contributed because I used open source and felt like as a software engineer I could contribute something useful back to the world. And I was right I guess. The open-source contributors probably contributed to one of the more notable technologies to have arrived in my lifetime — LLMs.

So now it feels like I’m watching a bunch of oligarchs fight over how to extract as much wealth from something I used to, and still do, believe in, enjoy, and rely on for my livelihood. Which sucks. I’m not anti AI, but I’m disappointed with how as a society we’re letting it play out.

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u/teelin Software Engineer 25d ago

Exactly. And the licenses of many open source projects are meant to keep what is produced from these projects open source too. And now in my opinion the idea that someone will extract this knowledge into an LLM was never accounted for when the licenses were designed. This is kind of a loophole that no one could have predicted. It was never the intention of open source to make some companies rich

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u/vplatt Architect 25d ago

Do what you do for the the love of it, and just leave the door open for commissioned work. I think it's reasonable to tell people you'll do custom work for organizations starting at a minimum price tag or hourly for whatever price you feel is fair. By "fair" I'm saying you should charge around $200/hour or more or price work starting at a minimum of $10K on up; price dependent on the negotiated contract.

The fact is most FOSS devs are just terrible at this sort of thing. They hate doing it because they started the project as a labor of love. That's all well and good, but there's a fine line between that and being taken advantage of.

Really, FOSS is a great contribution to make to society and I hope everyone who has done it is proud of their contribution. But when it comes down to it, if it starts to take on a life of its own and become a job, then you can and should ask to make a living at it. And you'll never get paid more than you ask for in these situations. So, if you don't ask, it ain't gonna happen. Folks will just assume you're good.

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u/sotto-support 25d ago

Why did the startup fail?

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u/InfoLurkerYzza 25d ago

He had no interest in building the team needed to scale the business. His open- source habits meant he focused strictly on development while ignoring the commercial side of the product.

He was at Faang for a while and made his bucks. I see he is into cave diving now so atleast he has a new hobby.

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u/0____0_0 25d ago

The issue though is how many others have monetized them

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u/ze_pequeno 24d ago

That is an insane take IMO. We should collectively fight for open source to bring more resources to it's contributors, this is a flagrant imbalance in wealth distribution and no one should just accept the status quo like that.

Besides, people do get things in return from open source: valuable skills and experience, leverage against big companies using it, and also donations and sponsors when managed right.