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The original was posted on /r/opensource by /u/bdhd656 on 2025-09-26 09:09:26+00:00.
I couldn’t and still can’t wrap my head around the idea of skilled people spending hours creating complex tools often with paid alternatives already available, and instead of monetizing it, they release it completely free. This act of placing one’s mind and potential ‘money machine’ on the internet, expecting nothing monetary in return but trusting in the community’s improvement, is truly astounding. Some even pay out of pocket for these things to keep running.
I understand not everything open source is free, but having it open source allows others to potentially use it for free or your property to be the community’s instead of yours alone, like blender, gimp, or libreoffice who give a completely working and valid alternative to the multi million or maybe billion dollar companies’ products, or things like uBlock origin which could have easily been made with subscriptions like a lot of thing before it, or the millions of projects out there left in hopes to help the community in some way.
I’ve always had an aim, to build my experience to the point where I could contribute, because this is where I’d feel fulfilled enough to know I can help, but I just keep wondering, if you get nothing directly in return, why would you personally put your project, hard work and potential money machine to open source?