I'm building a tool that makes working with the big open source project easier for some users. It makes the open source project accessible for more users.
In theory, it would be nice if my tool was open source / free to use. But nobody makes a tool like mine for free, because it is a lot of work and not essential for using the open source software. The kind of people who need it are not programmers and extremely unlikely to come together to fund an open source version of my tool.
My contribution is that I make the big open source project accessible to more people. (Aside from contributing back to the project, which is in my own interest, because contributing fixes is easier than maintaining a fork. A lot of contributions to this open source project come from proprietary software vendors like myself.)
(Sorry for the generic description, I'm trying not to dox myself on HN...)
In theory, it would be nice if my tool was open source / free to use. But nobody makes a tool like mine for free, because it is a lot of work and not essential for using the open source software. The kind of people who need it are not programmers and extremely unlikely to come together to fund an open source version of my tool.
My contribution is that I make the big open source project accessible to more people. (Aside from contributing back to the project, which is in my own interest, because contributing fixes is easier than maintaining a fork. A lot of contributions to this open source project come from proprietary software vendors like myself.)
(Sorry for the generic description, I'm trying not to dox myself on HN...)