Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself

#311

Post by Someone » Wed, May 20, 2020, 11:46 AM UTC

biztos wrote: post #262

yaseer wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an interesting question (as far as tax can be interesting!), whether patreon and other contribution/donations systems count as gifts, or income from your work. I'm sure the tax authorities would like argue it is income, if you're making $8K monthly on patreon (e.g. Dwarf fortress creators).

Patreon seems to think it's likely to be income: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/207477063-Taxe... Which makes me wonder, is there some other way to aggregate donations such that they are gifts?

I think most tax departments will say they are gifts, but also that gifts are income.

And “give €5 and get a sticker” might make it a sale, making it subject to VAT, too.

Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself

#312

Post by akulkarni » Wed, May 20, 2020, 5:09 PM UTC

We (TimescaleDB) spent a lot of time analyzing a variety of open-source business models, before deciding the one for us.

In case it is helpful, here are the results of our study: https://blog.timescale.com/blog/how-open-source-software-mak...

Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself

#313

Post by notfoss » Thu, May 21, 2020, 10:02 AM UTC

addictedcs wrote: post #218

imglorp wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice to see an open source audio fingerprint. I once interviewed at Mediaguide (now defunct?) who scanned radio broadcasts so they could sell reporting to advertisers when their ads ran, and record labels when their songs played. There's probably a ton more applications.

Radio/TV broadcast analytics is the most frequent use case. At least I receive a significant amount of questions regarding it, so the library has been optimized for this task. YouTube ads detection is also an interesting case that falls in this category. Other use cases are divided between game development, repeating content detection, robocalls detection, or just iOS/Android apps for Shazam like style features. Surp…

> Surprisingly a couple of times, I was asked about recognizing birds by their singing. The library can't do it, but it is something I am thinking about exploring one day.

Hopefully, it'll be easier than this: https://xkcd.com/1425/

Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself

#314

Post by pabs3 » Sat, May 23, 2020, 3:17 AM UTC

Some resources for that:

https://www.fossjobs.net/ https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources

Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself

#315

Post by pabs3 » Sat, May 23, 2020, 3:21 AM UTC

jbk wrote: post #57

I've been working on VideoLAN (VLC, x264, other...) for most of my professional life. For a long time, I had other jobs, working at startups around video, and doing VLC at nights and weekends and holidays. And now, I built a couple of companies around Open Source multimedia, where we do consulting, integration, custom development around software, applications development, licensing, support and so on. Those companies…

Do those companies have careers/jobs pages? I'd like to add them to this page:

https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources

Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself

#316

Post by laurencerowe » Sat, May 23, 2020, 7:31 PM UTC

I spent the first 10 years of my career working on and consulting with the open source CMS Plone. Consulting paid the bills. There were occasional paid projects for specific improvements to the core software, though mostly that was done in my own time. Contributing helped build up my skills and reputation which helped landing consulting contracts.

It was pretty awesome. For most of the time I was able to live somewhere fairly affordable and earn a comfortable income (though a long way from SV money.) I still miss that community and meeting up with them at sprints and conferences around the world.

Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself

#317

Post by XCSme » Tue, May 26, 2020, 12:58 AM UTC

erezsh wrote: post #308

XCSme wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for creating Chart.js, I use it in my analytics app[0] to display graphs, I didn't find any better alternative yet. [0]: https://usertrack.net/

Looks nice. Have you considered creating a free-tier for open-source projects?

Thank you! I did consider offering a free tier, the problem is that the script is self-hosted and I probably still have to provide support for the free users, which I can't (as I'm the only one working on the project currently). I do plan to create a free-tier or even open-source the project once I find a sustainable way to do it.

Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself

#318

Post by Arnt » Fri, May 29, 2020, 8:26 PM UTC

inimino wrote: post #125

Arnt wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you think that remark sounds to people who actually work with maintaining open source, and who have a rent to pay?

Like the truth?

This is the year 2020.

That's also true, but does that sentence sound like the truth? Is truth and/or accuracy the most important trait of the sentence, or even a significant trait?