I have a confession: for most of my life I’ve thought open source was stupid.
You see, I grew up struggling economically. When I discovered in high school that I enjoyed working on computers and that it paid well, I saw it as my way out of poverty. Code was my ticket to a different life.
I started using Linux in 1996, Slackware 3.0. At the time, most households only had a single phone line. It could be used to chat on the phone, or it could be used to dial up a BBS or the early internet, but not both. If you were fortunate enough to have two computers in the house, only one could use the internet at a time. Even if you had the newfangled broadband cable internet that didn’t use your phone line and was way faster.
I set up my Slackware box as a NAT router to share internet across the two computers we had (one my father had purchased for keeping track of taxes and whatnot, and one I had eventually built myself for playing games from money I’d earned doing odd jobs). Nowadays you buy a $99 router and you’re done. Back then, what I was doing was state of the art and could only be accomplished using IPTABLES on Linux for a reasonable price.
While I enjoyed using open source (kinda, what I actually enjoyed is that it didn’t cost any money) I never understood the business model. Do a bunch of work for free, give it away, then charge for doing more work? The economics never made sense to me.
And here’s the part where I risk offending people, so let me be careful: I have enormous respect for the idealism behind open source. People contribute because they believe in something larger than themselves, a commons of knowledge, freely shared. That’s genuinely noble.
But I could never square the idealism with the complaints. People give away their labor freely, then express frustration that they aren’t getting paid for it. And I’d think: what did you expect? You can’t give something away and also expect to be compensated for it. Those are contradictory desires. The business model assumes someone will pay out of gratitude or goodwill rather than necessity, and that’s just not how economics works.
This never made sense to me. That was a huge part of why I joined Microsoft after graduating college.
Fast forward to today, and there are only two times when I’ve contributed to open source and felt good about it.
The first time is when I went on Adderall for ADHD and suddenly programming felt easy compared to the struggle it had always been. It was easier for me to give away my work because it didn’t feel like I was doing something difficult, something that cost me real effort. The sacrifice was gone.
The second time is today, with the advent of AI coding. I’ve open sourced the majority of my hobby projects I made in 2025 because I didn’t suffer creating them.
And that’s when it clicked.