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by scardine 4599 days ago
If you are working with the same technology stack we work and are not finding bugs or implementing new features you are not playing in the same league.

We don't contribute to FOSS because we are hobbyists or good Samaritans, we do it because we need the features or fixes. We do it because in the long term it is cheaper and more efficient than maintaining a fork or developing a closed source component.

1 comments

Many software developers don't work with FOSS technology at work. I work in embedded systems and much of the library code I work with has been provided by manufacturers of the devices I'm using. I do find bugs in it and report fixes to the library developer, but they often have strange licensing and don't use github (or even public version control) so this work doesn't end up visibly attributed to me in public.

This doesn't mean that the people working in non-web industries "are not playing in the same league" with respect to skill, it just means that they don't have a huge public representation of the work they do.