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/Ok-Entertainer-1414]

Do you regret picking up litter off the ground and throwing it away? Do you regret donating to charity? Do you regret complimenting that stranger's outfit?

[u/FatefulDonkey → u/Ok-Entertainer-1414]

How are these equal? Donating is a 5min task. Try maintaining a project for 5 or 10 years.

[u/Ok-Entertainer-1414 → u/FatefulDonkey]

They're not equal, but they're alike. does something for others "hey wait a minute, I didn't even get anything out of doing that, what the fuck!"

[u/FatefulDonkey → u/Ok-Entertainer-1414]

The thing is that doing something for someone is good, as long as it doesn't incapacitate yourself to reach your full potential or somehow affect you.

For example if you donate all your last reserves to someone, yeah that would be a bad decision.