alt Hacker NewsIt is incontrovertible that the entirety of the open source / free software world exists, in a very fundamental way, because people experience personal reward by doing work that they give away for zero dollars.
The existence of risk does not eliminate the existence of reward. It's called "expected value", and it's non-zero, and it's for the person to manage for themself like everything else in life. Working for equity also involves risk, and nobody says that it's not compensation.
> If you release something to the world and place yourself in a high-visibility maintainer position, burn out on it and then decide to drop it, it's very hard to ensure that your legacy and reputation in perpetuity will be "released something great and did the world a solid by maintaining it for a while" as opposed to "person who overcommits, bails, and leaves the world in a jam".
This is like saying you suffer reputational damage by retiring from a career. The claim is clearly absurd. It's not hard to step down from leading a project in a way that preserves reputation in the same way that it's not hard to leave a company without burning bridges. Some people are bad at being people and fail at both.
My point is that the OP doesn't >lack awareness of other forms of capital, they're asserting that those aren't sufficient on their own, and that one of the reasons for that is the risk that stems from stepping down being something that you can fail at in the first place, with the consequences of cementing a reputation of "being bad at being a person" regardless of anything that's happened to that point. You don't have the opportunity of accumulating reputation without having that risk at the end, unlike a career, where you have the opportunity of taking a job that pays a regular paycheck regardless of whether you leave at the drop of a hat and burn all your bridges by doing so.