About Open Source Software (OSS)

The world runs on OSS. Your company is using it, your teams are using it, and you can't make competitive software without it. On average, OSS make up 85% of a modern application.

What Am I Doing

At the time of this writing, I maintain close to 10 OSS that are my own creation. Apart from those, I've made code contributions to Netty, Spring, Spring Boot, Couchbase, Maven and more. I also maintain a blog, and have almost 20k reputation on Stack Overflow.

Why I Do It

John Nash, a famous mathematician and subject of the Oscar winning movie "A Beautiful Mind", won the Nobel prize in economics for his work on "cooperative games". He demonstrated that cooperating is not a zero sum game and that by working together all participants may yield higher returns than the investment they make. The best real world example of this may be open source software.
Stephen Walli, in his blog post on open source motivations, wrote, "This wasn't contributing back out of altruism. It was engineering economics. It was the right thing to do, and contributed back to the hardening of the compiler suite we were using ourselves. It was what makes well run open source projects work."

What It Takes

OSS isn't self-maintaining; to keep up with new features, bugs and security vulnerabilities open source packages need time and attention to stay alive.

What Can You Do

It makes my day when someone appreciates the effort, but you can do more. I'm calling attention to the owners, maintainers and contributors of OSS; to normalize the idea that their time and effort is valuable, and by extension, increase the pool of prospective open source contributors. Funding OSS means encouraging even more people to contribute, grow, and build together; it's a win-win.