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Jakub Andrzejewski
Jakub Andrzejewski

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The reality of Open Source

Todays article will be a bit different as it will not be purely technical but rather motivational one. I was inspired by it after seeing a following meme on X.

The reality of Open Source

It will be about my thoughts on Open Source after doing it for a few years now and how we can all benefit from it.

Enjoy!

🤔 What is the problem?

The problem is that we all use Open Source in one way or another but we usually do not give enough credit to people who are maintaining it.

We use OS tools either directly - by installing an UI library in our web development project to accelerate development of our new website - or as a dependency for other projects - in this case, we usually are not even aware what packages we are using (good luck scanning full lock.json file :D)

In some cases, maintainers are not getting anything for their work apart from bad words and comments such as: It's so terrible that it takes you so much time to fix this bug I am blocked by. Get yourself together. I have seen too many cases like that to just ignore it.

OS maintainers dedicate their free time to build, maintain, and evolve the projects we use on the daily basis and we are not thankful to them enough.

🟢 My Open Source Development

For the sake of this article, I have gathered some information about my OS work:

  1. More than 3.000 GitHub stars
  2. More than 100.000 weekly downloads
  3. Used in more than 2.000 projects
  4. More than 5.000.000 total downloads

Honest work meme

And how that compares to gratification/sponsorships? I have one sponsor that I am fully transfering the sponsorship to my most active contributor - which basically means that I am not getting any monetary benefit for my Open Source work.

Just to be clear - I am not saying that I am the most active OS maintainer and I should get 1000 sponsors - I am happy to have a full time work that allows me to not care if I get any monetary gratification from that - I just do it for fun :)

But there are other people who dedicate their life to OS and should get more sponsors to be able to not care if they can survive till the next month. If you consider sponsoring Open Source creators, below I have created a list of ten people I recommend (in no particular order):

  1. https://github.com/sponsors/johnsoncodehk
  2. https://github.com/sponsors/harlan-zw
  3. https://github.com/sponsors/danielroe
  4. https://github.com/sponsors/zernonia
  5. https://github.com/sponsors/kazupon
  6. https://github.com/sponsors/dargmuesli
  7. https://github.com/sponsors/antfu
  8. https://github.com/sponsors/pi0
  9. https://github.com/sponsors/BobbieGoede
  10. https://github.com/sponsors/posva

They spend a lot of their available time to maintain OS projects that we use everyday!

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✅ Summary

Take care and see you next time!

And happy coding as always 🖥️

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