101–110 of 318 posts
Sustainability 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 l…
While my work is currently done outside my core working hours, I've been exploring if it is possible to make it self-sustainable and have been reading about a few other people who have been successful at this. I think the trick is to make it possible for people to pay you in one or more ways:
a) Don't ask for donations, but offer a support contract. It's easier for devs to get that approved.
b) Offer a hosted version at a reasonable price. Sell the convenience -- of course, this might not be feasible if your open source tool is not easy to offer as a hosted service.
c) Offer some premium features as a paid product. Companies are again happy to purchase a premium version if the pricing is not ridiculous (e.g. $500/year will be a no-brainer) and you can also throw in additional support.
d) Get a company to sponsor a feature if it is something that they badly want.
e) Charge for adding a company's logo in the Github repository as a less intrusive form of advertising.
f) Use your open source code and popularity to get a better paying job with work-life balance. Indirect monetization but hey, that's pretty legit.
g) Find a company that allows you to work on an open source project full time. Not too many companies do it but if your interests/strengths overlap with a project (e.g. Kubernetes) that you contribute to, this could be an option.
It has 2 steady income streams:
1. Monthly sponsorship donations.
2. Forging rewards from the Lisk blockchain. Those rewards are shared with the community.
SocketCluster powers Lisk's P2P network and protocol so on that basis I was voted into a forging position on the Lisk blockchain.
These two sources of income have been just enough to support myself and a couple of casual contributors. Took 7 years to get to this point.
Also, I occasionally did consulting in the past but that has not been reliable.
My experience makes me optimistic about blockchain tech's ability to help monetize open source projects. I'm particularly optimistic about the DPoS (Delegated Proof of Stake) mechanism because it allows big token holders to vote for open source project maintainers to be delegates on their blockchain and allows those open source maintainers to earn block rewards.
Forging on DPoS is like like Bitcoin mining, but a lot less hassle and requires no capital if you can get the votes. I'm working on the Lisk ecosystem now.
Helping others to monetize their open source projects in such a way that they can retain independence from corporate or government influence is my life's mission. My project is just a proof of concept.
BTW feel free to look for my email address on GitHub and get in touch with me if you want to participate somehow. I can't guarantee anything but I feel that the technology and incentives are improving - I'm working on a DEX ecosystem right now which should facilitate this.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Part of your reward is that traffic cone will stay in people's minds for decades or maybe centuries longer than the products of most of us here.
I tried to pay part of the rent with something like that and it never worked. What am I doing wrong?
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…
Everywhere around me, I see companies who expected to go big and profit on IPO failing. Nothing new, but I get the feeling it's getting harder to attract investors in that model (this was already a feeling I had before lockdown).
This kind of company you're building, who focus on profitability from contract work while working on the big picture between two contracts, may just be the most stable kind of company one may build, especially if you happen to have a low turn over.
I notice noone's mentioned Tidelift. Why is that?
Tidelift is a neat idea.
But it's far from the first attempt at finding ways to collectively fund OSS development and maintenance. I think by now we're a bit burned out and skeptical, after seeing various attempts tried every few years, and the financial figures that show up look pitifully small. To be fair, most of the others are bounty sites, with most bounties in the It deserves mention for being a neat idea, and it deserves to succeed.
But it would need to be paying out to significant numbers of OSS devs to show up as an answer to this Ask HN question.
What strikes me as odd is that it is usually been brought up as some sort of additional qualification (as in „open source projects promote good code“), but in reality what this boils down for you is just more potential work (your normal work + open source work), and also implies lowered expectations for salary please („you are doing coding in your free time anyways!“).
Seriously, I admire and respect open source developers, but fuck companies that make it mandatory to have worked on an open source project for hiring you.
That is seriously fucked up - companies that rake in tons of money, build on top of free software products, make it mandatory for their developers to provide proof that they can be further eploited (as that is what it comes down to - forget that „better code quality“ or „we are part of the community“ thing they usually use as the rationale).
Sorry, had to vent that.
And to OP: I was asking myself the same question (how to sustain oneself in a first world country by doing unpaid coding). I came to the conclusion that this is not possible for me, as I strive for a higher standard of living as well as some spare time.
To put it more bluntly: open source developers seem to be the monks or junkies of coding to me in that they are just fueling their desire to code but do not insist on getting renumerated for it. I am not saying you shouldn‘t be doing any pro bono work, but a high quality product like VLC for instance should be able to sustain properly paid developers.
I would like to interject here that many companies are specifically looking or requiring software devs to work or to have worked on „open source“ projects. What strikes me as odd is that it is usually been brought up as some sort of additional qualification (as in „open source projects promote good code“), but in reality what this boils down for you is just more potential work (your normal work + open source work), a…
Why? Open source coding is essentially pro-bono work, that's required by professional ethics in many fields. If we want to be regarded as valued professionals, there are some obligations to the general public that come with that.
For that matter, most developers are not being paid to work on the likes of VLC or some other COTS, where "should this be open source" is even a meaningful question. They're developing or maintaining some internal enterprise app, so any source code they develop will always be available to the final user in that basic sense.