Love’s labor’s lost
aka Toiling with open source projects aka Thankless sweating out.
Yes, it left-handedly supports the theory of “quid pro quo” and “there is nothing called free lunch”; all other pursuits are attempts against the natural processes and futile attempts to negate the nature’s scheme of things.
Read this lament by Ryan Boren, one of the chief architects of highly successful semantic blogging tool WordPress (you are sitting on it right now!).
Are you expecting fame and reward? I’ve contributed a heaping shitload of time to open source projects over the last decade and in that time one person bought me something off my wishlist and Nuclear Moose interviewed me. Oh, and I received an endless stream of pissy and petty emails from people who think they own me when they use what I give them for free. I was also constantly implicated in the conspiracy theories of raving idiots and mired in the politics of those who find evidence of elitism in every damn decision and make calls for class struggle against the oppressive devs with each breath. Such is the way it is. Do this as a hobby with no expectation of getting anything out of it or do something else and save yourself the disappointment
Anyway, open source and free software enthusiasts are hardy lot. They do not expect anything in return for the donkey’s work they put on any project. They do what is called in Sanskrit as “Nishkamya karma”. They are the true followers of the teachings of Bhagavat Gita. They renounce the natural human urges of possession and zealous protection. They refuse to be bourgeois.
May their tribe grow!