Ask HN: Why do you do open source?

This old discussion on the Programmers StackExchange might be of interest - http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/3233/why-do-p...

Off topic, but yet another good discussion that was closed by some narrow minded moderator.

Really? it is an interesting topic, for HN, but not for a Q&A site. (I actually sound like a Jeff Atwood snippet.)

It's not always free time. At companies I worked for, we upstreamed open-source changes, because we wanted to shift the burden of maintenance.

But I sometimes have similar motivations for contributing my changes to open source projects privately, too.

Painters paint, hackers hack