I'm giving up — on open source
A little over a year ago I wrote a blog post about open source and why I'm charging money for some of my plugins. Sadly, one year later I've reached a point where I'm just not willing to continue the way I did before.
Ever since I first started to use Linux I was fascinated by the idea of open source. Almost everything I built on my own is open source, and I'm still contributing to upstream projects I'm using if I encounter things I can improve.
I sponsored an open source project for the first time over ten years ago when I was still in university, because I always held the belief that if a project is valuable for me, it's worth supporting it. And if I don't have the time to contribute to it myself, I should at least support the people that do.
Of course, there are people that explicitly do not want any kind of sponsorship, but if they do, I'm happy to help. Working on an open source project is still work, and if you're doing a good job, you should be rewarded for it. I also always believed that if you ever started a project that is valuable for companies, they would support you in return, at least that's the reason why my own company is a monthly sponsor of Verdaccio and why I sponsored maintainers of libraries I'm relying on.
