I feel exactly the same (with ~300 forks, ~3000 stars - not that it means anything). It's a creative urge, like writing music (which I also do, and I feel the passion for both is very similar).

I've received some donations, but nothing that could pay for anything significant, but I don't really see the donations as something that might eventually pay, but instead I see them as "thank you for the work", which is always appreciated.

However, I have seen some upsides, which are hard to put a dollar value on:

* Found staff for my company

* Been asked to be a technical proofer on a Manning book

* Made great connections with smart people

* A powerful sense that I'm contributing to humanity (even if it's in a relatively small way), rather than just being a consumer

There are probably other things that I've forgotten, but there's more value to OSS than just cash.

My project has 2 stars, 0 forks, and I also can't stop keeping it updated :)

Hah my last project reached 6 stars and I'm still proud as fuck

Sounds like my projects too. Cept updating is hard when you have a toddler.

xlib? you've got 3 now :)

that's it. wow 50% increase in stars in one day. sly HN success!

I count 11 now.

Have you tried charging for commercial licenses? They can be the exact same as whatever you license it as now, but with a price tag. Relatively speaking it’s very hard for a company to donate money, but very easy to buy things. I know you said it’s not about the money, but if you -do- want to make more from it, maybe give it a try.

I've heard this idea so many times but I've never heard from anybody who actually made money like this.

Many do, including Kitze, the writer of the article. check out indiehackers for inspiration.

MySQL, Postgres, RedHat, ...

Personally, I find it the case that when somebody makes something their job rather than their hobby, they'll slowly begin on a journey of losing interest. You can take out your anger on a job and leave it at work on the way out of the door - your hobby/project? That lingers with you at home. Maybe OSS is best on the side.

> But I just. can't. stop. [...] I've tried suppressing the urge to create, but I just can't do it. Ideas, challenges, problems, unmet potential, are everywhere, and I can't unsee them. On many days I despair that I won't live long enough to build even a tiny fraction of the things I see in my mind. [...] my idea list just keeps on growing faster than I can keep up.

If you really want to stop, well, I can tell you what worked for me. :/ Basically, burn out on it. Leverage that despair to turn aside. Increase it by focusing on things whose absence badly harm people, but where external constraints make progress largely intractable. Unripe fruit; unproductive research career planning. This degrades the reinforcement of little successes. Disengage from the list. Make it something that hurts to look at; don't review it; touch it less often; set it aside; forget it. Keep two or three open-ended and intractable projects around to serve as distraction from the rest. Incrementally pull back on seeing opportunities. Sort of a twisted mindfulness: see them swarm by; acknowledge them; let them go; forget them. With time, they become less in-your-face noticeable. Let's see... Make supporting past work a resented burden. Have stuff you enjoy doing and "care about" to absorb the displaced attention and effort. And so forth. Attack the system. So the hose can be turned off. Or at least down to dribbles. Just perhaps be clear on what you hope to accomplish by doing so. "This hurts so I want it to stop" is perhaps an insufficiently nuanced objective. FWIW.

Far from your count (I'm at 59 non-fork - had to look it up - for which many are very small, and about the same non-public/local).

I've noticed that the ones that got traction/stars/forks were entirely unexpected and started as one hour hackjobs (ex-mode for Atom, trim_patcher, 1st gen Xbox One controller kext, Matterfront) whereas the ones I just can't let go and pour genuine long term effort into are the ones getting zero stars/forks (ArchMac is like 12 years now and I'm still the sole user).

Not that I care, I'll just keep on scratching my own itches, and I learned a lot (and still do!) doing that.

I would just like to say, as someone who will probably never be as much a net contributor as you but has probably benefitted monetarily from your impulses, thank you.

Damn, is it me who wrote that post ?

When you're a creative person, you're like a tree : you bear fruits whatever you do, you just can't help it :-) (I took that sentence from a presentation online, somewhere on youtube)

I'm in a similar position... almost every week I have an idea for a new project I really want to start, and every other week I actually do :D

It's just what I like to do... but one day, I do want to start my own company out of one of these projects... I know one of them is being used by a large train company in Europe and a local government in the US (because they wrote to me asking for help with issues! so government-y, write an email instead of opening a GH issue). But unfortunately it's not a project I currently have interest in working on (it's like 5 years old, uses tech I haven't used basically since then)...

But my reason for wanting to start a company is just so I have freedom to work for myself, not feel like a slave sometimes (well paid one, but still!) more than anything else.

I admire the OP for doing that and even getting his girlfriend and another developer on board! Good on him!

I've less repositories, ~30 repositories. 5 or 6 of them I would consider significant projects at least from my point of view (aka a lone developer who is actually more of a sysadmin/devops in his day job, so not it's not really my main trade). I've yet to reach a project with 100 stars (even if two of them are getting close \o/).

And indeed, I never got or even tried to make money out of it. I already fell kind of a moral obligation to answer to tickets, sometimes emails, and exceptionally phone calls (actually happened only once), if someone gave me money for a project I would feel even more morally obligated, so that's why I don't even try. Also, my projects don't exactly have a success in the thousands of starts and users, so it's kind of hopeless.

However, contrary to you, I'm far less active in the last few years (contrib per years, 2014: 491, 2015: 1228, 2016: 1095, 2017: 646, 2018: 225, 2019: 288). Basically, I lost a good chunk of my motivation, not sure why however. Either I grew tired of it, or my current job (since 2016) drain me of my motivation, or seeing tickets accumulating in my half abandoned projects discourage me, half thinking, "let not create another ticket generator" and "I should really fix this project before starting that new project... (and in the end doing none of those)".

It's not the lack of ideas, I have actually a few from small to quite big:

* web ui in JS to calculate production in Hearts of Iron IV (actually started that one, and also a good opportunity to learn frontend development)

* a dead simple and as transparent as possible artifact manager

* a small daemon to name your NIC because it's on a given network (think servers with several NICs and dedicated prod/admin/backup networks, it would far nicer to have them named eth-prod/eth-admin/eth-backup instead of eth0/eth1/eth2 (and sometimes eth1/enp0s3/eth0 because this special duck is wired differently).

* a C clipping library (I need one for a current project).

* a tsdb taking ideas from rrdtool, like fixe size DB, values computed at insert time, reducing resolution as time passes, round robin, with meta data like the unit attached to the metric, with a network endpoint, and some support for a multi-node setup, all that written in Rust (because I don't know the language yet).

I wish I had your problem.

After full time at work, gym, any real life tasks I need to attend (groceries, eating, bills, cleaning, etc...) it can be rather difficult and feels like starting a large project (or any) is hopeless (relatively for a single person in their spare time) or maybe intimidating.

Could you perhaps share some of your tips and wisdom as you are now older on how and when you started habitually doing this and how you keep up the energy and motivation? I'm surely not the only one interested in anything you can inspire with.

I have many ideas I want to start and I am excited about. Often I just do not know where to even start. Especially with limited time.

For me, the big thing is securing long chunks of thinking time. Thinking time is the most important time, hands down. When you think (away from a computer), you can't start on anything, so you have to go through it in your head. This makes me more creative because I don't end up spin-writing (writing code with no solid plan in place). You need at least half an hour to think, but an hour is better. I do all my design work like this, and by the time I'm at a computer my hands are just itching to write down what I've thought up. I used to do a lot of thinking during commutes, but now I work remote so it doesn't apply. But there are other ways to use time that would otherwise be lost. I'll sometimes do it during a run, or in the shower, or during some mundane chore.

You also need to set aside some down time, where you literally make a point of not doing anything useful for awhile.

I made a habit of optimizing my chores to give more opportunities to think. Sometimes the solution was to devise a better process. Sometimes it was batching many things together. Sometimes I'd need to invest in some gadgetry. Think of chores as unoptimized code.

For example, I bought a deep freeze and a vacuum sealer so that I could buy in bulk, and also prepare meals in bulk, then keep them in the deep freeze. Vacuum sealed (in a vacuum chamber based sealer), they last up to 2 years. I lived in a very rural location for a few years, so I got good at keeping track of what staples and foods to buy when. Frozen vegetables are usually fresher than "fresh" in the store. I also made my own bread in a bread maker. It's a lot of up-front setup, but once you're in the swing of it, it's basically max 2h per week of preparation for a whole lot of convenience. I'd also bake up a good selection of meals in bulk that I'd keep in the freezer and heat up in a sous vide cooker (for days when I was feeling lazy).

Eating right is essential. Poor diet ruins your thinking ability. Processed carbs are the worst.

I do my workout at home. That's not for everyone, because often you want the camaraderie. I prefer to be focused when doing a workout, so doing it at home works well. My workout is mostly body weight based. I used to box, so I stuck to the most efficient methods to maintain a boxing physique. My equipment is a chair, a floor mat, a walker, free weights from 1lb to 5lb, a pull up bar, a heavy bag, and good running shoes. Each day I do a 1h workout for a particular group (legs, core, arms, cardio, yoga, shadow boxing) which works out to once a week for each type.

When you say write down, do you mean design/list of tasks or literal code?

I live in a major metro area, so working out in my condo isn't an option and I do like getting out since I live alone (I go every day). I pick up what I need at the store when I walk home from the gym. It's an extra 10 minutes maybe. I keep my diet simple, meat, veggies, eggs, not much more and I don't eat any processed foods. My only chores are keeping my condo picked up instead of a mess of a bachelor pad, which it is in right now (har har).

Right now I'm trying to plan out my first side project in a while since job interviewing/preparation really burnt me out.

> On many days I despair that I won't live long enough to build even a tiny fraction of the things I see in my mind. It's infuriating!

Glad I'm not the only one in that boat. If it matters I'm 38 now.

"I can't not do it" is a phrase I've been employing for a few years trying (though mostly, it feels, failing) to explain what it is that compells me to do what I do.

But yeah, I get that.

> I can't. I've tried suppressing the urge to create, but I just can't do it. Ideas, challenges, problems, unmet potential, are everywhere, and I can't unsee them.

This is exactly how I am, too. I maintain a list of ideas of useful applications that I could build, particularly in the education space. I cannot stop coming up with f/oss ideas and I will not have the time to finish most of them.

Shine on you crazy diamond. You're one of the good ones, and people like you keep open source vibrant and interesting.

I'm working since 2011 only for OSS software and non-profit organizations (unintentionally) and it was starting all with Google Summer of Code for me. Earning money and working for OSS can go in the same direction, it does not need to be side thing.

That's interesting, if you could share your story I think we would eagerly like to make your acquaintance.

> But I just. can't. stop.

It's human nature to create and to want to help others.

I've got a lot of respect to the ppl who work on OSS, especially the maintainers since they're in the trenches tending to a lot of the daily crap we often don't see.

Your list would probably grow even faster... where are you based?

I've recently moved to Germany

You're a good person, keep up the good work dude.

> don't write OSS for money

Why not? I'd prefer working with OSS for money over proprietary products.

Because you won't get money from OSS contribution for most part. If your priority is money, then OSS is not the best option unless you have a clear strategy of monetizing it.

I will tell you a secret: There are corporate and non-profit organizations out there which want to you to write open source software and they pay you for it (I know it's shocking).

Dozens of open jobs at VMware for professional / career Open Source positions: https://careers.vmware.com/search-jobs/Open%20Source%20Engin...

Big companies have an Open Source Program Office (OSPO) where community / OSS skills and licensing knowledge mean you can help the company both consume OSS and contribute back to it.

One of which is finding a company that is a major contributor to OSS projects. It probably won't be the same as being simply a pure OSS contributor, but nothing that earns you money is likely to be.

That's based on a guy that just puts it out there on GitHub, doesn't have a side service based on his OSS stuff, doesn't offer support/commercial licenses, and so on...

Correct, and as that guy, I don't have enough time to build the side services and market it because of lack of time meanwhile maintain of job ofcourse (if you are planning oss without a job, tread carefully). Though I really want to so saving up for that.

I meant the original poster of TFA!

But still, it's something else to say

"OSS doesn't make money" (which is controversial, if not wrong)

instead of:

"OSS doesn't make money if you don't have enough time to build the side services and market it because of lack of time meanwhile maintain[ing] a job"

(which most can agree with)

I think they're saying don't write it because you want money, rather than don't write it in exchange for money.

Yeah, or get a full-time job that actually satisfies you. Ever since I started working I never created a private project anymore. If I don't like what I do at work, I find a different team or company that does something I want to do.

I could never imagine working on a side project while having a full-time job. That will inevitably mean you are doing neither of these things well.

How many hours a week do you work at your paid job?

Even better would be to work part time for sufficient money (if possible) and have more time for personal projects, no?

I work a normal 40h week. ATM securing enough funds for my future trump my personal projects...

respectfully disagree -- too broad a statement.. curl is not the same as MyFavortiePhPTableGenerator, and in 2020 should not be treated in the same ways