GitHub stars won’t pay your rent
I&#x27;m closing in on 100 public, nontrivial, nonforked repos on github. Since github&#x27;s inception, I&#x27;ve received a total of $200 in donations for my OSS stuff, 1 job from a company that uses a product of mine as the foundation of their business, and many job offers from people who are familiar with my work. I don&#x27;t make money off OSS, and never have (at least not directly).<p>But I just. can&#x27;t. stop.<p>I can&#x27;t. I&#x27;ve tried suppressing the urge to create, but I just can&#x27;t do it. Ideas, challenges, problems, unmet potential, are everywhere, and I can&#x27;t unsee them. On many days I despair that I won&#x27;t live long enough to build even a tiny fraction of the things I see in my mind. It&#x27;s infuriating!<p>And so I do my best to keep my focus small. I have a full time job, so I try to keep my extracurricular coding down to at the very most 3 hours a day if I can, but my idea list just keeps on growing faster than I can keep up.<p>I keep thinking that maybe I&#x27;ll calm down as I get older, but I started at 8, and I&#x27;m 44 now. If I had no financial pressure at all, I&#x27;d be doing this stuff all day. The only difference would be that I&#x27;d burn through my list faster.<p>But long story short, don&#x27;t write OSS for money. Have a full time job and do OSS on the side.