Monetizing, or at least trying to monetize can be kind of counter productive for many projects, specially smaller ones.
Personally, I have a few projects on Github that seems to be somewhat useful to other people... but not a lot people (my most "successful" project has 61 stars, not bad for a side project but ridiculous if you compare it with big projects in the thousands of stars).
Trying to monetize it doesn't worth the burden, maybe I could get a few bucks with Patreon or gratipay, but I would need between 100 to a 1000 times what I could reasonably expect to be given to make a living out of it.
Monetizing them also means I would have some moral obligation to maintain them properly. This really depends on your view on the question, but for me it's kind of import. Right now, I try to respond to bugs and PR as fast as I can, but if I'm feeling lazy or if the issue is to complex to be fix, I can leave it opened for months. Maintenance is purely best effort.
I've started these projects for various reasons, but one common denominator is that they enabled me to learn some stuff and/or maintain my competences (setup proper unit tests, documentation in rst, more advanced knowledge of Python, de-rusting my C, cmake, OpenSSL programming, Puppet types and resources...). One other side effect is that these projects give proof and credibility of what is written on my CV, so, in fact, it's not completely un-monetized...
Also, another driver for publishing these projects is: "why should I keep that to myself? it might be useful to other people" and even if it's not, GitHub is a convenient place to store code ^^.
I'm speaking for my personal projects, but I think I'm far from being an exception, big OSS projects that can be monetized are the exception, they are often core components (a kernel, a big library or framework, a big piece of infrastructure...), but many more smaller projects live (and die) around them serving their small purpose (if any).
Personally, I have a few projects on Github that seems to be somewhat useful to other people... but not a lot people (my most "successful" project has 61 stars, not bad for a side project but ridiculous if you compare it with big projects in the thousands of stars).
Trying to monetize it doesn't worth the burden, maybe I could get a few bucks with Patreon or gratipay, but I would need between 100 to a 1000 times what I could reasonably expect to be given to make a living out of it.
Monetizing them also means I would have some moral obligation to maintain them properly. This really depends on your view on the question, but for me it's kind of import. Right now, I try to respond to bugs and PR as fast as I can, but if I'm feeling lazy or if the issue is to complex to be fix, I can leave it opened for months. Maintenance is purely best effort.
I've started these projects for various reasons, but one common denominator is that they enabled me to learn some stuff and/or maintain my competences (setup proper unit tests, documentation in rst, more advanced knowledge of Python, de-rusting my C, cmake, OpenSSL programming, Puppet types and resources...). One other side effect is that these projects give proof and credibility of what is written on my CV, so, in fact, it's not completely un-monetized...
Also, another driver for publishing these projects is: "why should I keep that to myself? it might be useful to other people" and even if it's not, GitHub is a convenient place to store code ^^.
I'm speaking for my personal projects, but I think I'm far from being an exception, big OSS projects that can be monetized are the exception, they are often core components (a kernel, a big library or framework, a big piece of infrastructure...), but many more smaller projects live (and die) around them serving their small purpose (if any).