Re: Geeonx GUI library for LINUX and SDL 1.2

On Sunday 25 September 2016 09:34:15 Jonathan Dearborn wrote:
> Unfortunately, no nation's economy has figured out how to properly
> compensate or encourage open source contributions.
> 
People don't generally do open source for financial gain. The compensation 
received is less tangible than money, but it many ways more rewarding. The 
true measure of one's software skills is in having one's work widely accepted 
by the community of users.

I began writing FOSS decades ago as a means of paying forward the value of the 
free software I use. Small payback for the value I'd received, but one does 
what one can.

On the other hand, there sometimes is a financial reward. I've received 
unsolicited gifts of "thank you" money ranging from $10 to $600 for my work. I 
also received thousands of dollars worth of hardware for free to enable me to 
write FOSS to work with said hardware.

And the capstone of it all was the offer to buy stock pre-IPO in a well-known 
company (not Microsoft) because of the FOSS I'd written. (In a supreme fit of 
irony, said stock was sold not long ago and my now ex-wife received $65,000 as 
a result of the work she criticized as "working for free". Some people, hey?)

But perhaps of most importance to those like the OP is that many companies 
these days prefer to hire those who've done successful FOSS. If you're good at 
it, the doors are wide open in the job market.

Jeff