Comment by nickpsecurity
7 years ago
I like your route. Another thing to point out about just fire-and-don't-care-if-it-hits contributions is you still can take credit for them. You put your effort in, you improved the software as you see it, you benefit from that even if they don't want it, others can benefit from your fork, and (if branding) you can even highlight your improvement in CV or resume.
So, you and/or others might benefit from them taking your contributions. You and/or others might still benefit when they don't. You can't control what they do anyway. So, might as well set it up so you and others can benefit either way.
Fire and forget open source can be fun if you truly forget about it, because then you can be surprised by coming across it in the wild.
I wrote something in the early '90s, entirely for my own use. I thought others might find it useful, so tossed it up on my public FTP space at school, added a notice saying it was public domain, posted a single message to the appropriate Usenet group saying it was available in case anyone might find it useful, but that since it fully satisfied my needs I was not going to do any further work on it nor was I interested in any enhancements, and stopped reading that Usenet group.
I few years later I noticed Red Hat included a package with the same name ("suck"). Curious, I looked to see what it did--and found it was a descendant of mine! Someone looking for something like it found mine, which did a good chunk of what they were looking for, added the parts missing for their needs, and had been maintaining and distributing it.
(And I just checked...it's still in some Linux distros! It's in Debian 9, package name "suck". Too bad I've long since lost my original code. It would be interesting to see if anything of mine has survived in it).
Yeah, this is a great feeling.
Not anywhere near the same scale as proliferating throughout the linux package managers, but in my early teens I played an online text RPG and ended up writing a fairly large amount of code on top for playing / navigating / fighting etc. When my hobbies shifted away I shared it around and promptly forgot it.
I checked in briefly about 10 years later and was happy to find a lot of my stuff still floating around and being maintained/extended in various forms.