FFmpeg to Google: Fund us or stop sending bugs

Never work for free. It's a complete market distortion and leads to bad actors taking advantage of you and your work.

I've grown a bit disillusioned with contributing to Github.

I've said this on here before, but a few months ago I wrote a simple patch for LMAX Disruptor, which was merged in. I like Disruptor, it's a very neat library, and at first I thought it was super cool to have my code merged.

But after a few minutes, I started thinking: I just donated my time to help a for-profit company make more money. LMAX isn't a charity, they're trading company, and I donated my time to improve their software. They wouldn't have merged my code in if they didn't think it had some amount of value, and if they think it has value then they should pay me.

I'm not very upset over this particular example since my change was extremely simple and didn't take much time at all to implement (just adding annotations to interfaces), so I didn't donate a lot of labor in the end, but it still made me think that maybe I shouldn't be contributing to every open source project I use.

Now count how many libraries you use in your day to day paid work that are opensource and you didn't have to pay anything for them. If you want to think selfishly about how awful it is to contribute to that body of work, maybe also purge them all from your codebase and contact companies that sell them?