I'm not contesting the need to be compensated for work.

My point is that there's stuff that I have worked on to scratch an itch and don't feel the need for monetary compensation. I believe there's an intrinsic need to be part of something bigger than ones self, and participating by volunteering time to have the satisfaction of knowing that you helped make something you care about better is not a bad thing, if on your own terms.

The way DRH has talked about SQLite is that he is financially secure and by giving it away gets both the reward mentioned above as well as maintaining the value of the free software which he can still make money off of support contracts. He is choosing to do this because for him that effort is the most rewarding.

FOSS has been a foundational facet of the work we get well-paid to participate in. This is a case in which we have the option to have our cake and share it too.

None of this means you have to participate in this way, but I suggest that your viewpoint is yours and may not be shared by everybody else in the community.

I'm working on something I plan to give away for free as well. I'm backporting request multiplexing into HTTP/1, calling it HTTP/1.2, and working on updates to a few HTTP servers that rejected HTTP/2 and HTTP/3. I wrote my RFC draft first to really hammer out the edge cases before I go in blind on the implementation. I just finished the RFC draft 2 days ago and it took 9 pages, but the code changes in my estimation will be no more than 300 LOC for every existing HTTP/1.1 implementation I fork. My protocol adds one header to correlate a response and its originating request, and defines a new transfer encoding scheme that's just "chunked", with the the request ID in each chunk. It's simple stuff: I just want to multiplex request handling without having to adopt a binary protocol with a complex state for each request-response pair.

I'm not doing it because I'm Bill Maher and I'm offering the solutions to all of society's problems for free. I'm doing it because I want an HTTP server that does just what I need to do and is not a pain in my ass for my small set of use cases. I've use OpenBSD and its httpd for a couple years now, and I want to fix the only real problem I have with it because I know it's not hard to do. If they won't take my change, the worst they can do is say no and leave me to maintain my own fork in perpetuity.

As for group identity, giving altruistically and being part of something bigger than oneself are completely separate if you really dig into it. Those young women who joined Charles Manson's murder cult were certainly part of something bigger than themselves, while self-employed people who donate a portion of their wealth or adopt children out of the infamous foster care system are not.

I'm not saying group identity is necessarily bad, I'm just making my case that it's neither good nor bad. I would make the case for individualism as paradoxically foundational to creating the kind of society that creates people of stronger moral character, but that's just idle and unprofitable philosophizing, and any schmuck can wax philosophical and sound intelligently profound.

"If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life." -Henry David Thoreau