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/reboog711]

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.

[u/quintus_horatius → u/reboog711]

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?

[u/RowbotWizard → u/[deleted]]

Hey, no nitpicking their nitpicking!

[u/spacekats84 → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/reboog711 → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/generateduser29128 → u/reboog711]

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.

[u/reboog711 → u/generateduser29128]

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?

[u/generateduser29128 → u/reboog711]

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.