Yeah, I am one of those open source devs who doesn’t get paid for it. But I can’t really say it’s the fault of normal users. They’re just people trying to get by. The fault really lies in corporations using open source without supporting it. Some corporations do give back and support communities, but a lot just take and don’t give anything back.

Personally, most of what I write for my company, SciActive, is open source. The only thing I don’t release is my actual product (Port87), but everything I’ve built in order to build it (the ORM, Nymph.js, the UI library, Svelte Material UI, the WebDAV server, Nephele) are all open source.

I do get users shitting on these projects sometimes, but the majority of communications I get are respectful and gracious. It does sour the experience when someone acts rudely, but I try to not let them get under my skin. Some devs have trouble not being bothered by it, and for them, the rude users and lack of compensation are so much worse.

What keeps me writing open source though is that I just genuinely have a passion for writing code. I recently built a full text search engine into Nymph, and the whole process was so much fun. I think that’s what powers open source, genuine passion for what we build.

(There’s one project that gets shit on a lot more than my others, QuickDAV, which I’ve never really understood. A lot of people say they’d rather use SyncThing, which is fine, but they have different use cases, so it just baffles me. It’s like someone looking at Inkscape and saying they’d rather use GIMP.)