Fork My Code, Please (2012)

At first glance I thought the title next to your link was sort of "Free as in Kittens" but it was slightly different and a good article.

I agree with OP, and also with the Elm post.

But I'd like to point out that there's a hypocrisy at the heart of many popular open source projects. Yes, you're legally allowed to fork, and yes you'll be told to go "fork off" if you annoy the maintainers. But anyone who has the temerity to actually create a fork will be shunned or constantly bombarded with questions about why they're sowing division in the community. My computer can hold multiple incompatible forks without them mutually annihilating. Why can't people's belief systems?

Now, such sentiments often come from the peanut gallery rather than the maintainer. But maintainers could help more. When was the last time anyone saw a maintainer thank someone for creating a fork? Forks should be treated more like Andon Cords (https://itrevolution.com/kata). Creating them is an act of bravery, and even if you don't agree with the reasons they are a valuable source of feedback. These are events to be celebrated and encouraged. A fork that doesn't gain traction isn't a 'failure' to be derided, it is a valuable experiment at worst, a negative result that didn't take away energy from other efforts. At best it actually influenced upstream. Everyone should be enormously grateful.

I don't know if there's any expectation that someone will actually hire them. I've written the same thing before. Sometimes you'll get requests to do custom work. For instance, I've had grad students see something I've posted online who've asked me to do X, for some X that would take hundreds of hours. "Sure, I'll be happy to do it for $150/hour" is more polite than saying "Do your own research".

I've seen that Stallman does consulting at $250/hr, which is interesting when you consider that I, a no-name from a no-name state school with 8 years' experience, am billed to my company's clients at more than 1/3 the rate of someone who's effectively a celebrity.

While I'm not recognized, my OSS is on the way to reach 2M installs this year from npm. Usage from CDNs of a single project is already 1+M/year.

Mid-term (within 5 years) I am considering whether to go consulting or trying to sell software products (or both). What is the value you see from OSS developers? Assuming is not consulting for their own libraries ofc.