Lots of open source software is funded by big established companies (FAANG and others). People work in those big companies and part of their job description is to support this or that business critical open source project.
Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
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Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#12I have sponsors on Github and rake in a cool $2 per month. It's obviously less after taxes so I also have a day job. https://github.com/sponsors/Lemmih
Be hilarious if the tax people in various countries started checking repos to see if people were reporting their donations as they assumed you guys make bank.
They do not need to do that, they just get a report from the banks and ask you to declare your income.
Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#13In my case, it is not completely full-time, but a decent portion of my time.
The "trick" in my case is that I am an independent consultant, and open-source is how I dedicate some days of my workload (and a bit of weekends too, but only when I want it).
I have published an open-source Ruby data processing framework in 2015 (https://www.kiba-etl.org).
I sustain myself by two ways: 1/ consulting on either Kiba ETL (which brings leads) or other data projects and 2/ "Kiba Pro" commercial extensions providing more features with vendor support (yes, proprietary code, not OSS, on that specific part).
I have explained in depth how and why I decided to go that route in a talk this year:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yv1EnYTXIeA
About GitHub Sponsors: I'm giving it some thoughts, but some parts are blurry for me as a French company, lawyers have no answers yet, and GH support could not help me from a legal/fiscal standpoint here. I also do not expect much, but will likely try it out.
Hope this helps, although this road is not for everyone!
Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#14I give away my database publishing software (https://www.speedata.de/) for free and make a living with offering services (helping companies producing high quality product catalogs and datasheets etc. using the software) Its not much, but I live a happy live.
I spend about 1/2 of the time doing services and 1/2 hacking on the software. Quite often, customers are paying for new features in the software so it is paid hacking. Great!
Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#15But the question is how do you sustain yourself while working fulltime on building/maintaining open source software.
I'd estimate that at least 99.9% of open source software is written by people without direct payment eg for every 1 paid contributor there are 999 who do it either as part of their role in a job or for free. Even the paid contributors mostly have other income from consulting, social media, speaking, etc.
That's not to say you can't make a job out of it, but actually planning to do that would be incredibly hard. You'd need to recognise something that's missing from the software ecosystem, implement it, release it, and find enough people willing to pay you to develop it to make it a full time job. Alternatively, find a role at a company that pays people to work on open source, eg Google, Facebook, Canonical, etc. Arguably that's going to end up feeling like a normal developer job though.
Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#16Working enough making money purely from Open-source is difficult to achieve and usually requires; amazing projects, a good reputation, a big network of followers.
But there's also some good monetisation strategies:
- Consulting, at the bottom of your project "Hire the creator"
- Donations, at the bottom of your project "Donate here"
- Open-core, have an open-source core and a premium version with more features (these suck)
- Sponsorware, Open-source the library after enough people have paid you for it [1]
The easiest is to create open-source projects in your day job (where needed). It makes for a better architecture of modular components and plugins and helps you learn open-source development without the pressure of making money from it.
[1] https://twitter.com/calebporzio/status/1221437814748909571
Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#17I think most open source workers survive on their jobs only. Whether working for a Megacorp or a smaller company. HN loves to say people can earn via patreon, but I think you can count on one hand the number of developers earning anything reasonable via Patreon. Most developer's Patreon accounts receive peanuts. The ones that do get good money are in charge of very famous projects, and spend a huge amount of time marketing their project, and you can find sponsor links everywhere.
Open source is very hard to monetize (yeah, RedHat, but that is not similar to most open source projects.
Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#18Our company lets us work on opensource libraries in work time. How did this happen: we pushed management to allow opening some of internal code under premise that "someone else will do the same job, opensource it (since it's platform-level stuff that has nothing to do with business), their implementation will become a de-facto standard, and we'll have to rewrite our internal stuff to match the industry standard". That ultimately worked.
Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#19Sustainability is another way to say subsistence. The dirty secret of open source is that much of it is powered by maintainer guilt.
If you’re looking to make money, I don’t recommend you get into open source. I wish this weren’t the case, but this is the current situation.
Unfortunately, it seems the best path if you want to do open source as a career is to do enough open source to get your name out there and then leverage that into a job offer at some megacorp. Maybe you’ll be able to get a role doing open source, but that’s rare. Hopefully you can continue to do open source in your free time at least.
That said, if you insist your goal is to get paid doing open source full-time, here are my tips:
1. Create a project that is end-user facing. No one is aware of which transitive dependencies they are using, so no matter how useful your software, you’ll struggle to get donations, sponsors, or consulting work unless the end user knows your name. Reliable, error-free transitive dependencies are invisible. Therefore, the maintainers are invisible, too. And, the better these maintainers do their job, the more invisible they are. No one ever visits a GitHub repository for a transitive dependency that works perfectly – there’s no reason to do so. But a developer investigating an error stack trace might visit the repository if for no other reason than to file an issue. At least then there’s a small chance they’ll see the maintainer’s plea in the README. (I wrote more about this here: https://feross.org/funding-experiment-recap/)
2. Make sure it’s something that the enterprise cares about. If you build a cool P2P project or a new programming language you’re gonna have a tough time. No matter how useful or innovative the project is. On the other hand, if you’re making a front end framework or a UI library for React or something like that, you’ll have a much better shot at getting companies to sponsor your project.
3. Don’t be afraid to ask for money. Contact companies that are using your library and tell them you want them to sponsor your package. One great hack for finding out who is using your package is to open an issue called “Who is using this?” and ask for testimonials or offer to put users’ logos or links in the README under a “Who uses this” section. Lots of developers will out their companies as users of your package if you do this. This gives you a good list of companies to initially reach out to. Without tricks like this it’s impossible to know who’s even using your package. That’s the first to step to finding sponsors.
Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#20I'd love to see more core & pro versions of Open source.
Like https://www.group-office.com/
or https://www.proxmox.com/en/
That way maintainers give and receive, not only give.