Agreed. I find it admirable that people can produce code for purely altruistic purposes. I wish I had the time to do that in between my work that pays the bills and my work on my own project that will hopefully soon earn some money.
At the same time, I do end up using a lot of open source software as part of that work, and when I have issues with it, I do submit fixes back to the project. Sometimes they are accepted (in some form), sometimes they're ignored. This isn't overly time consuming, and if nobody did it, I'd be spending a lot more time fixing bugs myself.
Likewise, I occasionally open-source stuff I build that happens to be reusable. As far as I can tell, none of that code is widely used, but on the off chance that someone is looking for something exactly like it, it might save them some time.
Nah, it's because it's more fun to work on open source code! I don't work on stuff that's not fun or not interesting in some way, so there's definitely always an element of self-interest.
At the same time, I do end up using a lot of open source software as part of that work, and when I have issues with it, I do submit fixes back to the project. Sometimes they are accepted (in some form), sometimes they're ignored. This isn't overly time consuming, and if nobody did it, I'd be spending a lot more time fixing bugs myself.
Likewise, I occasionally open-source stuff I build that happens to be reusable. As far as I can tell, none of that code is widely used, but on the off chance that someone is looking for something exactly like it, it might save them some time.