This is a bit of a meta-post, but bear with me.
Quite often Open Source software is written in people's spare time. Even folks who manage to make a living from customising, installing and supporting open source tools, also contribute in their "spare time". (I put this in quotes because, essentially that work time and spare time meld into one another, such that its hard to tell one from the other).
In the interests of not leaving people out, I'll also mention that so is a lot of not-open-source software, people write tools/apps/games to sell as well (see the iphone apps service).
What is spare time? The definitionn I'm using says its time that isn't paid for by an employer. Time that the person can choose to spend however they wish.
I and many other people I know choose to spend that time not only writing and contributing to, but also supporting open source (monetarily free) software. We do it because we enjoy helping people get on, because we want the software to be used, and so on.
Eventually, to my point: Supporting people is not free, it comes at the cost of supporting other people, or writing more documentation and software. If supporting one person wastes time because they don't help to find the answer themselves, or can't provide actual code that illustrates their problem, and so on, that's time wasted that could have helped other folks with clearer problems.
Similarly, writing software is not free. Writing solutions for other people, implementing their code, comes at the cost of writing code for everyone.
While I'm at it, adminning open source software websites and systems isn't free either. Configuring installs, updating planet configs, making icons and css. All this doesn't take seconds.
Looking back at the last couple of weeks, I'm amazed at how much time I haven't spent doing what I would actually prefer in my spare time (supporting users). Yet it needs doing, if we don't build up and contribute to the community, it doesn't exist. Now if Matt can start another rant about redesigning/upgrading perl-community websites, I wonder how much of that would also get done.
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Last modified: 2009-05-01T22:33:45