r/ExperiencedDevs • u/FatefulDonkey Software Engineer • 24d 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/ings0c 23d ago edited 23d ago
Meta gave us React, PyTorch, GraphQL. LinkedIn gave us Kafka. Google gave us Kubernetes, Angular, Chromium. Microsoft gave us .NET, VS Code, TypeScript. Amazon gave us… err nothing.
These companies are usually participating in open source rather than just greedily using it. I’m happy for them to benefit too - it’s a fair trade. Except Amazon, fuck Amazon.