Ask HN: How many professional developers contribute to open source?

I have noticed the same, I have worked with probably 500 developers in my 10 year career - I do a lot of integration work, so I communicate with developers at external companies a lot, I would say only ~5 of them contributed to open source, so roughly 1%

Lots of them wanted to - but it was just a matter of time ... they have full time jobs, families etc

I'd ask a different question. How many professional developer's employers are investing their resources back into open source?

Since tech companies are the financial beneficiaries of everything open from operating systems to databases and programming languages, shouldn't "they" be reinvesting?

Why would we expect professionals to do this for free? When they do it is extremely generous.

I used too, but I'm not interested in being pulled into the increasing amount of politics involved or public scapegoating involved in social media.

My contract says my employer owns absolutely everything, everywhere, any time, so, no, I do not contribute to open source in my free time.

Naturally, we depend heavily on open source software to run the business...

A large portion of this is dependent on the software stack you end up working with and the associated communities. The Ruby on Rails and javascript communities heavily advocated open source work so many developers have open source work and/or a blog. Then you look at .Net. The amount of open source work is significantly smaller. Most software stacks have communities somewhere inbetween

I work on open source projects. but mostly my own projects. Because I'm kinda a anarchist, I hate conforming to other projects' coding standard, naming convention and going through their code review procedure.

most of the time, when I find a bug in an open source project, I would directly report and post my solution in the bug report, instead of fixing it myself.

Probably 1% or less. Obviously, HN is skewed, but where I've worked I've been the only one or the only one out of a few that codes outside of work (and I don't do it that much).

The thing is, after 6-8 hours of working, most people want to do other stuff. Read, spend time with kids/wife/SO, go take a walk, play video games, etc. If they make any contribution to open source, it's during work time to serve business needs.

A tiny fraction, but I suspect many more have tried and been put off by personalities and politics. Quite a lot of better known projects are plain offputting to get involved with.

I know far more who've put out a few bits of solo programmed freeware or shareware, or pushed the odd utility to a library though.

Of all the places I've worked, none have encouraged or suggested contribution, but many have used open source in the business.

I've never met someone else in the corporate world that contributes to FOSS.

Recently i started contributing to open source projects, I came across a guy who had Java conventions all over the source code for a python codebase i suggested him otherwise but the guy was reluctant. i kind of disappointed.

Who are the core that drive this massive, amazing ecosyssytem (yeah, please what's another word for ecosystem? Am I the only one tired of it to describe any system?). Here are some thoughts.

1. There are the leaders of the movement who often don't work full time it's for themselves or an employer that pays them to be them. A few examples of this group (I'm including both "free" and "open") would include Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Bruce Perens, Eric S. Raymond, Tim O'Reilly, Larry Wall, Guido van Rossum, John Gilmore. That's obviously not a complete list.

2. There are the outstanding professional developers with passion for their FOSS projects. They always seem to work for themselves or always manage to find employers who encourage open source contributions.

3. There are developers who are learning or otherwise haven't yet started working full time.

4. The 1% (mentioned by several commenters) who have very busy lives but manage to contribute as much as they're able.

I may be off and I'm definitely over simplifying but I say thank god for all four groups and others. I feel gratitude every day.

Yes, the FOSS world is political and narrow at times, which is a shame but that's human beings anywhere you find them.