Comment by vidarh

I've "made money" from my relatively limited open source contributions primarily by being moved straight past coding stages when interviewing a few times. That's enough payoff for me. Other than that it's mostly a "why not?"

There are some - very limited - pieces of code I keep private relating to my consulting business, but I've seen more downside in keeping code private over the years than not. E.g. lots of code I've written that are locked up in companies that no longer use it that I wish I could still use.

The proportion of code I have that would create a moat that makes it worth holding the code back is miniscule.