Why I give code away for free — Reez Patel

Someone asked me recently why I bother open-sourcing side projects. The subtext: you're giving away your time for free. And sure, that's one way to count it. But the ledger has another column.

What I get back

Every project I've published has returned something I didn't pay for:

Code review from strangers who owe me nothing and spare me nothing.
A portfolio that writes itself — no resume bullet beats a repo with real users.
Serendipity. Two of my jobs and most of my good friends in tech trace back to a README someone stumbled into.

Knowledge is one of the few things that multiplies when you share it. Code doubly so, because it runs.

The honest caveats

Open source isn't free as in beer or speech — it's free as in puppy. Issues arrive at 2am. People will be rude in your issue tracker with an confidence that paying customers never have. Maintenance is the actual cost, and it's paid in weekends.

My rules for staying sane:

No is a complete sentence. Unpaid scope creep is still scope creep.
Archive boldly. A maintained archived label beats an unmaintained promise.
Write the README for your past self. Everyone else is a bonus reader.

The real answer

I give code away because I learned to code from people who gave code away. The entire stack this site runs on — the OS, the editor, the compiler, the framework — was built by strangers and handed to me for free. Publishing my little tools isn't generosity. It's paying down a debt I can never fully settle.