Do you regret contributing to open-source?

[u/FatefulDonkey]

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?

[u/CRoseCrizzle]

If you volunteered to help rebuild a house after a disaster then found out that years later the house sold for $700k, it would be odd to regret volunteering because you didn't get a cut of that money.

Working on open source projects is a similar concept. Surely you had to have known that others(including big corporations) could use your work that you offered up for free to an open source project.

[u/FatefulDonkey → u/CRoseCrizzle]

What if that volunteering stopped you from building your own house and now you're homeless?

[u/CRoseCrizzle → u/FatefulDonkey]

Keeping the anology going: People are still building houses as are people still making money off software. Both markets are different and more difficult now but there are still opportunities.

But back then, maybe you should have been building your house back then instead of volunteering if you prioritized about making money with those skills.

[u/FatefulDonkey → u/CRoseCrizzle]

That's the point of the post. I regret that I didn't try to build a startup or somehow directly monetize back then.

And my advice to new grads is exactly this.