It’s 11:43pm on a Monday night. My 6-week-old son is asleep in my office so my wife can get some uninterrupted rest for the first half of the night. He’s finally asleep now, and I probably should be also after a full day of work. But I’m not done for the day. Even though I’m a software engineer by trade, I’m also a computer programmer by hobby and passion. So I do what I’ve been doing for well over a decade now: I boot up my computer to write some code.
Not everyone is driven by money, some people care about improving computing.
What do you do for a living and why don’t you do it for free?
Nobody is forcing others to make free and open source software
That wasn’t an answer to my question.
Edit:
But clearly a lot of people here are expecting people who develop and maintain open source software to do it for free, regardless of how many hours it takes and how obviously unsustainable that notion is at scale.
Nobody is claiming that FOSS is slavery (i.e. people being forced to work for free), but expecting other people to work for free is entitlement, plain and simple.
And yet the very entitled people in these comments have the nerve to tell other people that they should donate their time for the greater good, when you can be sure they gladly pick up a check every couple of weeks for whatever they do.
It’s shameless. Remember that FOSS developers don’t owe you shit.
What someone does for a living is really none of anyone’s business.
Unless you develop FOSS, in which case clearly random entitled bitches on the internet get to tell you what to do with your time and what it is worth, judging by these comments.
Not OP, but I develop software for a living, and I also contribute, for free, to open source projects. The idea that I should be paid for some random project that I enjoyed is a nice one but also rather absurd.
If you develop software for a living that means you spend the bulk of your work week writing code for money, probably for a for-profit business writing closed-source, proprietary software.
And please don’t get me wrong… That’s not to invalidate the volunteer work that you’ve done in your free time for whatever FOSS projects that you’ve contributed to. That’s a commendable and generous use of your free time and as a FOSS enthusiast I appreciate whatever you’ve done.
But now just imagine if you could spend your work week writing code for FOSS projects, while still making a decent living for yourself or your family. Imagine how much more FOSS code you could write with entire weeks of time instead of just the odd weekend here and there. Imagine how much effort you could dedicate towards maintaining larger projects and reviewing code from other contributors to accelerate the pace of development. Imagine how much more, high quality FOSS software would be available to everybody to use, for free, all over the world if more people like you could spend their days writing FOSS code instead of writing proprietary code.
That’s the point of what I’m saying.
Obviously not every project can afford to pay every developer for their one-off patch that they submit on a random weekend. Most projects don’t have the funding to do that, and even if they did the logistics of it are unreasonable. But that’s not really the point. More sustainable funding for FOSS means that more developers would be able to spend the bulk of their time writing FOSS code and maintaining FOSS projects. Large FOSS projects like Blender absolutely rely on this concept.
In my opinion people who are genuine allies of FOSS should want more stable and sustainable funding for FOSS development, so that more talented people can spend more of their time doing work for FOSS projects instead of for-profit companies.