alt Hacker NewsThe article recalls people that open-source software is not necessary created for the community, but rather by the author, for the author oftentimes.
The "support" is not only the maintenance burden which (sometimes) could be solved for money. It's also the features that the original author just don't find useful at all, but others may want to have.
If I don't have Mac, never used it and don't plan to buy it, why would I want to accept contribution to support this platform? It's useless for me, I won't be able to test it (and it will break sooner or later), and once the code is accepted, it's usually assumed that it would be maintained by the application author, not the code contributor (unless additional CLA is signed, etc).
> The article recalls people that open-source software is not necessary created for the community, but rather by the author, for the author oftentimes.
Exactly. A FLOSS license essentially states "I put together this cool thing, please take a look and pass around."
When I published FLOSS projects of my own, my motivation was to share with the world something that was useful to me and that I enjoyed doing, in case it was of any use to anyone. Once I discovered a small FLOSS project of mine was used by a big name commercial software suite and I was tremendously surprised for finding out by googling it, and found it extremely funny. And that was it. Is this so outlandish?