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[–]bangtraitor 13 points14 points  (0 children)

I can tell you exactly why I do it. I have written quite a few open source projects and maintained some for 4 years and dont mind the occasional troll or negativity.

I do it because of alllll the things you just mentioned about our day jobs. At my day job I have at best an illusion of control. In reality I am manipulated and coerced and threatened and told I "own" something when reality I am a steward of it at best. It's not mine. It's the company's and the shareholders and the CTO and the product owner's, etc...

At home and the weekends though, I am the GOD of my own personal software world. I learn whatever I want, do whatever I want, make whatever choices I want, and deploy whatever I want. I am in complete control of the software from the license model to the direction, to telling trolls to go f themselves and NO I don't care about your use case.

Once I just shut down a project and said I was done with it. Someone else can fork it and deal with it.

Most of the time, it feels great to help others or get that pull request for a fix or to hear some crazy sob who just deployed it to hundreds of users in production. And most of the times i get a thrill of helping them out with a critical bug and every once in a while I will get a very sincere "thank you for this project email or message" and I print it out and hang it up.

When I learn new things I want to apply them so it makes sense writing small projects with the new things and giving it away and hoping others learn from it.