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

#161

Post by falcor84 » Mon, May 18, 2020, 12:49 PM UTC

WJW wrote: post #54

qu83rt wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It frustrates me that companies like Microsoft claim to love and embrace open source these days, but what smaller up and coming projects with independent developers are they financially supporting? That's the kind of support of open source I'd like to see from large companies/corporations/enterprises!

How would the developers still be independent if they are supported by a big company? If they use the money in lieu of a day job they become de facto employed by the company, only with even less job security. If they don't use the money, why do they need it in the first place? In fact, from the perspective of the bigco, there seems to be a thriving ecosystems for leftpad-style packages already even without additional…

If a dev is supported by just 1 company, then you're right, but if they're supported by many, a-la the Patreon model, then that can give them a lot of power.

I have no idea how a small developer could ramp this up, but for a larger project, the approach appears to be to form a foundation, and to give contributing companies a chair that's closer to the table.

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

#162

Post by amenod » Mon, May 18, 2020, 12:56 PM UTC

prepend wrote: post #150

generalpass wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the vast majority of people take a lot of open source for granted. However, a lot of open source projects are, frankly, extremely rude to users. Instead of some copy-paste "kindly please direct your question to this resource over here" the users get "GET THE @#%% OUT OF HERE STUPID N00b" and this is from people directly with the project (e.g., domain email address). If you think this doesn't impact your…

I’d like to see some nice analysis on this because my experience was completely the opposite. I don’t work on open source much (a few lines over 20 years), but the only patch I made was super welcoming and a dev bent over backwards to teach me how to diff and submit patches. I just assumed this was common.

This is also my (limited) experience, though one does find... less than welcoming maintainers. :) It depends a lot in how you approach the project though. Being humble and careful not to waste maintainers' time more than necessary goes a long way. Remember, it's their free time they are donating to you, so make sure that you went extra mile to really prove that the bug is in the project and not in your code.

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

#163

Post by geerlingguy » Mon, May 18, 2020, 12:58 PM UTC

This year I made it a goal to try to make my OSS work more sustainable. I still have some steady contract work and a couple side projects that make up the majority of my income, but I've started devoting regular time to reviewing code and working on docs and YouTube videos, and so far it's shown some positive results.

I was getting maybe $10-20/month from Patreon and GitHub Sponsors, but in the past two months I started asking people directly to support my work if they could, and to my surprise, a number of people have! I don't know if I'll reach a 'sustainable' level anytime soon, but if I can, I'll be able to spend more than a few hours a week on pure OSS work.

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

#164

Post by dueF7un3 » Mon, May 18, 2020, 12:58 PM UTC

jbk wrote: post #144

dueF7un3 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder : do you have the same engineer turn over than "regular" companies, that is developers leaving after two or three years max? 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 profi…

> I wonder : do you have the same engineer turn over than "regular" companies, that is developers leaving after two or three years max? We don't. Clearly not. People leaving is very rare. But also, our recruitment is very different from normal companies. :)

Nice :) I did expect that much, if only because working on free softwares feels way less pointless than working on yet an other e-commerce company or b2b app fighting to get users through advertisement.

Would you mind telling us more about your recruitment process? I'm not in a hiring position myself, but I guess it would be of value for a lot of people here, giving how turn over is a serious blow for everyone.

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

#165

Post by excid3 » Mon, May 18, 2020, 1:01 PM UTC

I tweeted about my first $1k/mo GitHub sponsor recently. https://twitter.com/excid3/status/1250428994303885313

A lot of the sponsors that do well are ones that offer things that the sponsor wants. Trading a couple hours a month consulting for $1k/mo in sponsorship helps make it worth doing to the donors. They want to support you, but they also probably could use your help.

Effectively you're productizing consulting and that flips it from a donation to a purchase. They get a tangible thing for their money this way. I think that helps a lot for making sponsorships more successful.

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

#166

Post by ddevault » Mon, May 18, 2020, 1:02 PM 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…

25 FTEs is an incredible achievement, and you should be very proud. The rewards are enormous - VideoLAN has a massive impact on human culture, more so than 99% of all businesses. Taking on VC to "grow" may be difficult, but is it something you really need to do? What you've built is amazing, and if you can sustain it at its current size, you'd be doing wonderful work. Endlessly chasing growth is a fool's errand, and you'll probably end up making compromises you never wanted to in order to get there.

I think one piece of wisdom I'd share about sustainable FOSS for this thread is: be happy with a smaller size. A FOSS business is probably not going to be a unicorn, but hey, that's okay, isn't it? If you're building software you and your users love, and you're putting food on your table, then you've got something to be proud of.

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

#167

Post by rom1v » Mon, May 18, 2020, 1:05 PM UTC

bergstromm466 wrote: post #159

jbk wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder : do you have the same engineer turn over than "regular" companies, that is developers leaving after two or three years max? We don't. Clearly not. People leaving is very rare. But also, our recruitment is very different from normal companies. :)

> our recruitment is very different from normal companies. Please could you share a bit about what your recruitment strategies look like? And do you all work remote?

(I'm an employee at Videolabs)

2~3 years ago, I contacted j-b on IRC and got an interview. This was the first time I used IRC to find a job :)

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

#168

Post by Accujack » Mon, May 18, 2020, 1:06 PM UTC

svjatoslav wrote: post #141

I asked Richard Stallman this question: His answer was: Live cheaply. Eric S. Raymond answer was: Be independently wealthy. I have tried to reach billionaire philanthropists (Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Dean Kamen, Warren Buffet, and others) with the idea that there are very talented people around who have brilliant ideas (say for instance another Newton or Mozart) but are not financially independent to afford to work…

Are you surprised they didn't respond?

Your solution to this problem seems to be focused on what other people can do to make things easier for you and others like you, but that's not how humanity works.

You're ignoring that your request is unreasonable because you're taking the easy way out - looking for a source of money and convincing yourself that your efforts deserve it because it's easier than doing the work yourself.

Stallman is right. Live cheaply. If you prefer, work full time at a well paid job and use your own money to support open source development. The rich aren't obligated to hand you money because you believe you're doing the right thing.

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

#169

Post by generalpass » Mon, May 18, 2020, 1:06 PM UTC

tomxor wrote: post #151

generalpass wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the vast majority of people take a lot of open source for granted. However, a lot of open source projects are, frankly, extremely rude to users. Instead of some copy-paste "kindly please direct your question to this resource over here" the users get "GET THE @#%% OUT OF HERE STUPID N00b" and this is from people directly with the project (e.g., domain email address). If you think this doesn't impact your…

Please remember: each open source project is a different person, sometimes literally. That they share licensing ideologies does not necessarily mean the people producing them behave the same way. That said it's fairly well known that the pressure of hoards of obligated users on popular projects can easily push the most patient of authors over the edge. As some anecdata: My experience in various open source projects a…

My comment is specifically regarding users, not contributors, and the intent is not to generalize across all projects (though many users will do this anyway).

I have seen projects where devs are completely behind a wall, and that's fine, but I don't understand make something for people to use, free of charge, get angry at when lots of people use it and have questions about using it.

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

#170

Post by AlchemistCamp » Mon, May 18, 2020, 1:09 PM UTC

simias wrote: post #22

Basically your only options to get paid to write free software is either to work for a company that develops it (say, Mozilla or Red Hat for instance), create your own company and make your software open or manage to get donors/sponsors (by far the hardest and less reliable method since it can come and go very quickly). Getting paid for open source software is like becoming a successful musician, from the outside it'…

Another option I see a lot is to create a consultancy that gains prominence due to its open source work. Formidable Labs, Thoughtbot and Plataformatec are good examples of this.