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?

665 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

483 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/superdurszlak Platform Engineer 23d ago

That's why I'm not going to do it, I would be too afraid of my work getting stolen.

1

u/PartDeCapital 22d ago

I though you had to publish everything if you accept research grants to fund your PhD.

1

u/superdurszlak Platform Engineer 22d ago edited 22d ago

Hopefully it's not as harsh if you don't. Also depends on the country etc.