I have been writing OSS for so long, and I know for a fact some of it is widely used (one is a standard library for a popular language) that I figure I’m about even.
We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and I pay my dues by contributing. I figure folks who take the time to regularly write good, detailed, useful bug reports have, too. I’ve had people contribute translations; those count! I’ve had people submit PRs that were just spelling corrections in readmes - anybody who’s contributing to whatever their ability is counts. I can’t write C well anymore, and on some projects the best I can do is track something down to where I think the issue is; IME, that can cut a big fix effort down to a fraction of the time, if the submitter is right. And, of course, actual PRs that fix bugs are the best.
New feature PRs - I’m really guilty about submitting those, but they’re a mixed bag. They’re a lot of work for the maintainer, not least of which is the decision of whether they want it.
Anyway, there are more ways of contributing besides money, even for non-developers.
For myself, I’d rather have effort contributions than money contributions. Again, this is just me, but money brings with it a sense of obligation, and obligation takes the fun out of projects. That’s just a job, with less stability.
I do, occasionally, contribute to projects that solicit contributions - projects with maintainers who’ve faithfully been maintaining a project with regular releases for years - projects like Calibre. But in general, odds are not bad that ant given developer has used at least one of my projects at some point: in the entire Linux ecosystem, so many of us are using free software someone wrote without compensation, and it just feels a bit unfair that only some people benefit financially while the vast majority of OSS contributors receive nothing.
I have been writing OSS for so long, and I know for a fact some of it is widely used (one is a standard library for a popular language) that I figure I’m about even.
We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and I pay my dues by contributing. I figure folks who take the time to regularly write good, detailed, useful bug reports have, too. I’ve had people contribute translations; those count! I’ve had people submit PRs that were just spelling corrections in readmes - anybody who’s contributing to whatever their ability is counts. I can’t write C well anymore, and on some projects the best I can do is track something down to where I think the issue is; IME, that can cut a big fix effort down to a fraction of the time, if the submitter is right. And, of course, actual PRs that fix bugs are the best.
New feature PRs - I’m really guilty about submitting those, but they’re a mixed bag. They’re a lot of work for the maintainer, not least of which is the decision of whether they want it.
Anyway, there are more ways of contributing besides money, even for non-developers.
For myself, I’d rather have effort contributions than money contributions. Again, this is just me, but money brings with it a sense of obligation, and obligation takes the fun out of projects. That’s just a job, with less stability.
I do, occasionally, contribute to projects that solicit contributions - projects with maintainers who’ve faithfully been maintaining a project with regular releases for years - projects like Calibre. But in general, odds are not bad that ant given developer has used at least one of my projects at some point: in the entire Linux ecosystem, so many of us are using free software someone wrote without compensation, and it just feels a bit unfair that only some people benefit financially while the vast majority of OSS contributors receive nothing.