I am in the fortunate position where Open Source has been a true life changing community for me. I benefited greatly over the years from it, in both life experiences, jobs and opportunities. However the moment in which a project turns from great and fun to a massive pain in the butt is years after you have first created it and the motivation that originally brought you to it might not be applying at the present day any more.
For me the only sane way out was to pass the helm and recognize that there is no path for the things I have created to be compatible with a business model that makes sense to me. (I built libraries and frameworks)
That itself takes a lot of life experience. With all the experiences I gained about this, I would never go and tell someone that their attitude of feelings are wrong.
> For me the only sane way out was to pass the helm
That's what I did.
The good news is, the folks that took it over, have added so much good stuff, that my original code is almost gone.
I've written software that was still in use, 25 years later. It gets "stepped on," along the way, and that's actually great. It can be ego-deflating, but I've found the cure is to walk away, and work on something new.
But is that a sustainable model? Because it does not really solve the feeling of dread, particularly if others build successful companies on it. I don't have that feeling myself, but I talked _a lot_ to Open Source developers over the years and it's easy to feel disappointed when you yourself built something, but then you see other people build on VC funded companies on top.
There's probably a basic philosophical point. If you get bent out of shape because someone is taking your open source software or Creative Commons content or whatever and profiting from it in accordance with the license, you probably shouldn't do the work or shouldn't publicly release it.
I am in the fortunate position where Open Source has been a true life changing community for me. I benefited greatly over the years from it, in both life experiences, jobs and opportunities. However the moment in which a project turns from great and fun to a massive pain in the butt is years after you have first created it and the motivation that originally brought you to it might not be applying at the present day any more.
For me the only sane way out was to pass the helm and recognize that there is no path for the things I have created to be compatible with a business model that makes sense to me. (I built libraries and frameworks)
That itself takes a lot of life experience. With all the experiences I gained about this, I would never go and tell someone that their attitude of feelings are wrong.