Whats your excuse?

I dont know how to code.

I contribute to free software projects

Open Source has nothing do with price, retard. Its the license - what you can do with the software. Stallman sold copies of Emacs on floppy disks, Red Hat makes millions selling open sourced software, emulator developers make millions on Switch emulators that are open source. You can buy versions of Linux for money that are entirely open source.

Are you just pretending to be retarded? Maybe Any Forums has been LARPers all along and don't know shit about software.

For minor hobbyist projects, small contributions that will benefit me personally may lead to more readily-supplied contributions and interest down the line, meaning my user experience is improved. I did some small work involving HID firmware and documentation for a project over a year ago even as a complete novice, and it not only enabled me to learn a lot and achieve a personal tangible result that enhanced my workflow, but lead to others expanding on my work. All this time after, my work was improved or referenced, meaning I get recurring improvement returns on my initial contributions. For the great deal of potential returns in scenarios like this, it pays off very well for hobbyist goals.

I would likely not offer the same to a corporation's project if I am putting in a lot of work because the return will not be as focused on my personal interests, short or long-term. They would be paying their own staff, but not me, meaning it is not a community effort, but a quiet contribution that is repaid unfairly. I'm not a communist, but I expect to be paid if others aren't, and if they aren't, I will only contribute if it is meaningful or enlightening otherwise.

Yes, Any Forums is filled with retards who don't understand what Open source means.

Are you mentally retarded? All the major FOSS projects, including the linux kernel, are basically enterprise special interest projects with fleets of paid developers, yet companies encourage and bait people to volunteer work for free. It's a minority compared to the enterprise devs but they still try to extract free labor from you. Linux, React, AOSP, even Nvidia's open source scientific computing CUDA libraries. Imagine contributing to an "open source" library that's locked to proprietary hardware, but retarded academia kids think they're contributing to society by helping out a multi-billion $ megacorp that financial benefits from their free work. You're just some drooling retarded child on Any Forums who has no idea what's actually going on with FOSS. No one should work on FOSS unless they're being paid.

>muh tiny toy project
No one's going to use it, most likely. If by some misfortunate twist of fate your library gets popular they're going to bully and threaten you to provide warranty for them when something goes wrong like they did to the log4j guys who were UNPAID VOLUNTEERS working with the Apache foundation. And they will 100% steal from you. Some enterprise monkey doesn't give a shit, they'll just copy whatever the fuck they want and you can suck his cock. I've seen companies that wholesale copied libraries without attribution, sanitized them, and then rehosted them on internal repositories like it came out of the ether and no one will ever know. If you ever worked a day in your life you'd know it's common as fuck but you haven't, because you're an underage twit.

Enjoy working on FOSS if you're a spineless, corpo bootlicking cuck. Just kill yourself, honestly.

Open source devs unironically do it for free

holy based

I do contribute to free software
The reason I started one of my projects was
>I had a need that wasn't being met
>It was not marketable because its primary audience is content pirates
>I'm still in college and needed something on my resume
I was able to swing that into a six figure job, so it was absolutely worth it for me

Because Kant was a Kunt and the categorical imperative doesn't real. I also don't seed my torrents.

I already have a full time programming job