Wow. These reasons match exactly why I've built open source software in the past (now running on your iPhone).
Fun. Rewarding. Feels important. Pure.
Maybe didn't save my life, but given a different start, definitely plausible.
It wasn't for nothing
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Re: It wasn't for nothing
#62Guix has been utterly transformative for my scientific work.
It lets me maintain a lab notebook (my shell history) with perfect description of what software versions commands I ran used.
I don't upstream much. It's just packages I maintain in my own channel that support this.
On a multi user HPC server environment, it's simply ideal. Every user can have their own system setup. Love it.
Re: It wasn't for nothing
#63I'd love to know how the authors financials work. It sounds like a dream to work on something just because it's fun and fulfilling. I have mouths to feed and that dominates much of my career choices. I'm in a small town in a small country so earning a FAANG salary is not an option. I can't save up and go work on a dream project.
My guess is that the author lives in a European country with a much better social safety net than a place like the US.
Re: It wasn't for nothing
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it really though? I imagine way more people would love to spend all their free time on their hobbies, and would sacrifice some of the luxuries of the modern world, but work crap jobs. And most of these people don't have kids. See: the amount of miserable people on Reddit and elsewhere.
If you have good relations with your parents, you can grind away in their basement. For obvious reasons, many people cannot or do not want to take that approach
Not all countries have a social stigma attached to living with parents and a degree of parental interference/influence in your adult life is accepted. Perhaps this is because of high interest rates - can't just get out of dodge and take a loan on a house.
Re: It wasn't for nothing
#65I'm not a developer but I totally relate to this. Most of my creative pursuits are weird, niche, sometimes avant-garde. If I didn't make my artifacts, nobody else would, and it is so intrinsically rewarding to see my visions instantiated, even if they pale in comparison to my first imagining of what they might be. Because I have fringe-y interests, most people don't necessarily "get" it. (Probably true of everyone el…
I've made some game mods that have touched thousands of lives.
Way more than my OSS projects though haha
But it feels good in retrospect
Re: It wasn't for nothing
#66[dead]
Re: It wasn't for nothing
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Richard Stallman was right in the same sense Karl Marx was right. The people would , in fact, be better off if each have according to his abilities, and received according to his needs. The problem here is the problem of incentives: you can state your desired end goal (prosperous communism, or free software utopia), but there is no mechanism to get there from here, and even if you somehow do get there, no mechanism t…
> I can really only name a handful of projects that are widely used and of high quality that have not been largely funded by commercial world: OpenSSH, some other BSD stuff, what else? Is this perhaps though a result of most projects allowing donations, and some companies (e.g. Google) having a lot of capital to throw around and funding them more-or-less just because? Would Linux not still exist in a similar form to…
> Would Linux not still exist in a similar form to today?
Majority of work on Linux is done by people who are paid by their employers to do exactly that. Just look at this:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/news.itsfoss.com/huawei-kernel-...
Google involved in Linux is mainly not through their donations to Linux Foundation, but through code written by Google employees on the clock.
Re: It wasn't for nothing
#68I'd love to know how the authors financials work. It sounds like a dream to work on something just because it's fun and fulfilling. I have mouths to feed and that dominates much of my career choices. I'm in a small town in a small country so earning a FAANG salary is not an option. I can't save up and go work on a dream project.
Seems like he's a DevOps consultant. 30 seconds of googling will reveal that. And since the company he works/worked for is Norwegian, the company financials are also open.
In any case, close to no-one here in Norway earns a FAANG salary. At lest not as a salaried employee.
Re: It wasn't for nothing
#69Great post. It reminded me a bit of this one from the creator of SerenityOS: https://awesomekling.github.io/I-quit-my-job-to-focus-on-Ser...
Is there something about writing an OS that helps recovery from addiction? Or perhaps the causality is reversed.
Re: It wasn't for nothing
#70Finding that "intrinsic motivation" to work on a hobby is something that really helps to keep you going. Often we're extrinsically motivated by others praise, social media likes ete. While praise is no bad thing, it doesn't always happen or you can be knocked off course by negative feedback.
I'm often amazed by the intrinsic motivation and long track records of people working on open source.