[josephg]

I’ve contributed a huge amount of opensource code over my career - almost all of it entirely unpaid. I don’t know the statistics, but I know many other people who have done the same.

I think there are a lot of high profile opensource projects which are either run by corpos (like React) or have a lot of full time employees submitting code (Linux). But there’s an insanely long tail of opensource projects on npm, cargo, homebrew etc which are created by volunteers. Or by people scraping by on the occasional donation.

[watwut]

npm was a company for years now. It was initially created as a volunteer one person project, then they create company 10 years ago and eventually sold to Github which was sold to Microsoft. It has spent more time being developed as a paid thing then by unpaid volunteers doing it on the side.

[josephg]

I'm not talking about npm. I'm talking about the 3.1 million libraries hosted on npm. And the ~150k libraries available in rust's cargo, 187k ruby gems, 667k pip packages, and so on. For every React ("brought to you by facebook") there are thousands of tiny projects made for free by volunteers.

[watwut]

I have some there, two of them made on the clock on the job. For others I am 100% ok with them being used in the scope of the license. I would find it incredibly absurd if someone called users "leeches" for using these things.