Hacker News Reader

Why do people contribute to Gitlab and help a for profit company for free?

I'm curious about what motivates you such as improving a tool that you use everyday or code quality?

It's a for profit company, but they still not only give away the source code, but offer a great deal of hosted functionality for free.

So contributing helps the community whether your contribution also helps the company or not.

Seems kind of like asking "Why would you give money to the Red Cross? They have employees that get paid a salary for running it."

If it's a good cause and you benefit from it, I certainly wouldn't avoid supporting it simply because someone else might profit indirectly from my contribution.

Thanks for the response, I'm not in the open source community and didn't think of Gitlab and Red Cross as a similar concept.

You contribute something you need. The deal is that you benefit from the change yourself. Upstream gets your change for free, but will (hopefully) continue maintaining it. (If they don't take the feature in it doesn't matter they got it for free ...)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com