I’ve published 19 plugins on WordPress.org. I’ve given away more hours of help than I could count. And I’ve made a living on the web since 1996, not in spite of giving my work away but because of it.
I first gave this talk in 2011, and the question it answers has only gotten louder. In a year of monetization fights and open-source funding debates, can you still give your work away and pay your mortgage? I think you can, and I’ve spent fifteen years proving it to myself.
This is the honest version: what giving away actually returns, and on what timeline; where generosity pays, and where it just costs you; how to tell the difference before you burn out. You’ll leave with a clear-eyed way to be generous in this community without going broke doing it, and good reasons to do it anyway.
