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It occurred to me today that the social value of the open-source work I do in my free time has probably been an order of magnitude more useful to the world than everything I've ever done as a paid employee. Needing to seek a wage almost certainly makes me a less productive member of society than I would otherwise be.
The number of boosts this is getting implies that a lot of folk feel similar, and that's sad.
@jsbarretto That's true, but I bet there are also a lot of people who don't feel similarly and thus are not reacting to this post. Obviously I can only guess at the real numbers, but I would imagine that among programmers (or writers, organizers, etc) who have worked on #opensource projects, only a small fraction of them have had a meaningful impact on the world through those contributions.
@diazona @jsbarretto I bet their open source work is probably still more positively impactful than their day jobs.
@hosford42 @jsbarretto That's what I'm saying, I don't think so, at least not for most of them.
@diazona @hosford42 The problem is that it's extremely difficult to measure the value of FOSS work. As an example, I maintain a variety of libraries in the Rust ecosystem. I had no idea who was using them, and still mostly don't. When I got my current job, I found to my surprise that several of them were already in their dependency tree. (1/2)
@diazona @hosford42 (2/2) Unbeknownst to me, I'd already been generating value for them (be it relatively marginal) before I even got the job. Because the value of FOSS is smeared across many social contexts, its value is much more difficult to measure than the financial output of a company.