I’m a fan of Dragons’ Den on the BBC as it’s an interesting peek into the world of business, which quite fascinates me and the other day Duncan Bannatyne said something that made me think about how I interact with the open source community:

Turnover is vanity
Profit is sanity

Profit is a strange word to use in open source as by definition there is no profit as the software is free but I do recognise a version of that statement when I write open source software. What I mean is I tend to write open source software as an investment in myself. I count new contributions as profit, whereby I increase my knowledge of a particular area while at the same time helping to make it a better area for other people. I also learn new skills and ways of doing old things from the other developers in the community, which increases my profit margins. Coming to an open source project for the first time, I invest a certain amount of my time and skills and in return I add to those skills and to my knowledge of that area of expertise. So for an initial layout of time, I can profit quite quickly by developing and learning at the same time. (more…)