Always thought writing free code is devaluing yourself. So, the stories coming out how the most popular used libraries' dev/maintainer having no income, complaining afterwards doesn't surprise me.

Why do people devalue themselves? I have no idea.

I think there's this problem, it's very easy to write a small thing for free as a side project, and I'm all for that and do it. I'm a software engineer because I enjoy it, think it's fun. There's a difference between fun and work.

So when your hobby project is used by a huge number of people and you're still the only one maintaining and getting loads of requests for support, there's a point when it goes from fun to work. That needs to be handled somehow, and often isn't.

But it's not all bad. People have been given jobs at companies because they wrote a library that company uses, so it's not all doom. But I get what you're saying.

We're a community. I kinda think of an open source project like an answer on Stack Overflow. We like to share our cool ideas. If we only ever worked for money, so much cool stuff would never get made. Problems come when people expect stuff, or (and I think this is often the big problem) when people start to make money using your code without kicking anything back to you. Licenses that prohibit cloud services are a fairly new thing, directly responding to this.

Also, dwarf fortress. A free project that's been running for years added to steam recently and made 7 million last month, or something like it. Did they devalue their time?

@atheist "we are a community" thats why people develop free crap for the anticipation of fame and fortune until they wants to be paid, then its crickets....

@jassole no, I write free crap for fun. I don't do it seeking fame and fortune. But if I gained "fame" from it, but was then expected to do lots of work to support the free crap and no fortune, I'd have a problem with that. I would do something about it, and it's entirely possible that would be saying "I'm not able to support this full time without x donations" or something to that effect. It's the choice between do you try to make money from a thing, or open it up fully to other contributions from people that are also willing to work, maybe as part of their job (something I do) or as a hobby.

Part of my job involves contributions (mostly bug fixes) to open source projects we use.

I write programs because I'm bored.

Some singular other person might need to use it for their own dumb shit 10 years down the line (i've done this many times) so I throw some of the more polished stuff up on github under the least restrictive license possible.

The cycle repeats.