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tombertHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

But after a few minutes, I started thinking: I just donated my time to help a for-profit company …

… But after a few minutes, I started thinking: I just donated my time to help a for-profit company make more money. LMAX isn't a charity, they're trading company, and I donated my time to improve their software. They wouldn't have merged my code in if they didn't think it had some amount of value, and if they think it has value then they should pay me. I'm not very upset over this particular example since my change was extremely simple and didn't take much time at all to implement (just adding annotations to interfaces), so I didn't donate a lot of labor in the end, but it still made me think that maybe I shouldn't be contributing to every open source project I use.

Original discussionFFmpeg to Google: Fund us or stop sending bugs886 source comments · at import
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ironman1478HN

Never work for free. It's a complete market distortion and leads to bad actors taking advantage of you and your work.

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chartered_stackHN

I understand the feeling. There is a huge asymmetry between individual contributors and huge profitable companies. But I think a frame shift that might help is that you're not actually donating your time to LMAX (or whoever). You're instead contributing to make software that you've already benefited from become better. Any open source library represents many multiple developer-years that you've benefited from and are using for free. When you contribute back, you're participating in an exchange that started when you first used their library, not making a one-way donation. > They wouldn't have merged my code in if they didn't think it had some amount of value, and if they think it has value then they should pay me. This can easily be flipped: you wouldn't have contributed if their software didn't add value to your life first and so you should pay them to use Disruptor. Neither framing quit…

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izacusHN

Now count how many libraries you use in your day to day paid work that are opensource and you didn't have to pay anything for them. If you want to think selfishly about how awful it is to contribute to that body of work, maybe also purge them all from your codebase and contact companies that sell them?

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