Being busy with Open Source since the 90s building Open Source CD-ROMs for the Belgian Unix Users Group.
However, my first open source project was "Make CD-ROM Recovery (mkCDrec)" released in 2000, which lead to a complete rewrite in Relax-and-Recover (ReaR) together with my German friend Schlomo Schapiro in 2006. ReaR took a while to take off and lots of energy and time was put into it to become what it is today (most likely the best DR tool for Linux). As ReaR is 100% open source and we did all coding and testing on 'free' time the financial return was close to nil. However, we did not do it for the fame (who knows me?) or the money (could have richer doing paid work), but because I believe in the power of open source. As I use open source on daily basis (for which I also did not have to pay) why should we be selfish?
In the course of the year we wrote several other open source tools which are very useful for certain communities, e.g. ReaR-automated-testing, adhocr, upgrade-ux, horcm-utils, etc. Furthermore, we also assisted in other open source tools like cfg2html.