I think it's a very bad idea or at least those projects should not be business friendly ?<p>I created and maintained an open source project for more than seven years. Used by a lot of companies (big names Oracle/IBM/SAP/VMWare ). Even if it was a really fun and I learned a lot with this project<p>I will never do it again and I encourage people I know to stop contributing to Open Source unless it's part of their day job.<p>You can of course have little toy projects and learning experiments but should not work on open source project unless you have a clear idea on how to make money from it. If you feel like you want to do charity, there are other people worthy (than big corporations).<p>What do you think ?
I am a freelance web developer working mostly as a frontender and in Node.js. I very often sell my clients on the idea that something I develop for them is better as an open source module. I then charge them for that time as if I built it just for them.<p>I do not consider this unethical as I always tell them up-front that I am doing this, and they are still getting this functionality. Several times I release the module under their name after as well (on Github and/or NPM), depending on their wishes.<p>As for the big players like Oracle, I am personally not a fan of the organisation but in their defence, they release plenty of open-source projects (Graal comes to mind: <a href="https://github.com/oracle/graal" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/oracle/graal</a>). And you know Facebook has a whole ecosystem they maintain in PHP, React, machine learning, etc. Their developers are paid to work on these projects. Google is the same way as far as I know.<p>So "maintaining for free" might not be completely free.