I usually support my open source work with my full time job. it's not ideal, but it is what it is for now.
Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
251–260 of 318 posts
Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#252Depending on the application/field, one option is to combine it with open source hardaware. People tend to accept that they have to pay for hardware.
The best would be to combine paid hardward + subscription for software. Does anyone know any fully open source example of this? I don't.
Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
15 years ago I was on a date with a wonderful young lady. We had a picnic and I brought my (at the time) very modern projector to watch a movie, projected on a bedsheet in the woods. Windows Media Player refused to play the DVD. No internet access at all. I thought I had failed...until I remembered that I had installed VLC. Opened the VTS.VOB on the DVD directly and boom, the video started and played back without a s…
How did you power the projector? Did you drag a generator into the forest too?
thank you hacker news, asking the real questions here. i'll be very upset if we don't get the answer to this question. we must know every detail.
Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#254Easy question: I get a paycheck every other week from my employer, Red Hat, who pays me and thousands of other people to build, maintain, and support enterprise open source software. We're still hiring, by the way.
Are they still paying peanuts? I'm actually surprised more companies haven't take advantage by poaching from Red Hat. It's pretty much a free opportunity to get some decent people on the cheap. And it would still probably be like 2x bump for most people there. Or more, depending on location.
Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#255I've been working full-time open source for two years. I'm spending my savings to sustain myself. Not sure what will happen when I run out of money. I receive around USD 40 of donations per month and use them mostly to pay servers, domains, and other project's expenses. For reference, my top 3 projects on GitHub have 12k, 5k, and 2.5k stars.
To be clear, I'm not complaining, I think it's worth it.
Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#256If you want to work full-time on open source, then you need to treat it like a job. Either find an employer who will pay you, or start a business and become your own employer. One way to start an open source business is to use a public/private licensing model, a.k.a. dual licensing with an 'open' license and a commercial license. The key is that you can have readable, modifiable, redistributable source code, without…
I don’t see any of those licenses listed on https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical and it took me a bunch of digging in the license-review mailing list archives to find when it was submitted for consideration (most recently anyway, sounds like it was submitted previously too): https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.... The consensus on that list is that License Zero violates certain tenets…
I don't care about other people's definitions of the term open source. To me, software is open if I can read the source, modify the source, and redistribute modified or unmodified copies. If I have to pay to use it when creating proprietary software, or within a commercial context, then so be it. It makes sense that the people most closely deriving financial benefit from a piece of software should be the ones to fund its continued development and maintenance.
The FSF's concept of four freedoms always appealed to me, but the problem is that freedom 0 allows people to take away the freedom of others, because it allows the creation of proprietary software. The Parity Public License doesn't have that hypocrisy. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#257I wrote sidekiq.org starting 8 years ago and blogged about my experiences over time, e.g. https://www.mikeperham.com/2012/08/26/the-sidekiq-experiment... I sell closed source Pro and Enterprise focused feature packs for my OSS projects. This is known as "open core". My first full year in 2013 I sold $85k. I'm in the millions ARR now.
I pretty much stole Mike's business model, and peppered in some cloud-y saas for browserles.io. I'm almost done with year 3, and will hopefully hit 500kARR this year. Mike's story was a lot of inspiration for me, and I think licensing + cloud-ifying your opensource projects are a ton more viable than hoping for Patreaon or other platforms to pay you. Self-bootstrapped indiehacker style was great for me, but it does r…
Wow, that's right on track with my growth. Congrats man, you'll be in the millions soon enough.
Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#258I wrote sidekiq.org starting 8 years ago and blogged about my experiences over time, e.g. https://www.mikeperham.com/2012/08/26/the-sidekiq-experiment... I sell closed source Pro and Enterprise focused feature packs for my OSS projects. This is known as "open core". My first full year in 2013 I sold $85k. I'm in the millions ARR now.
Your talk on IndieHackers was amazing. Could you please point to how licensing works in open source. I get the user has to buy license - is it like a key that talks to your server or how do you stop the abuse etc ?
Every system and market is different. You will need to determine if licensing and piracy are significant issues (sometimes they are a good problem to have, it means people are using your tool!) Some languages and ecosystems are harder than others to secure.
If you have $1m in sales and $1m in unlicensed usage, do you have a problem?
In general though you should focus on building value, not building walls around your product.
Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#259Many years ago I created some very widely used libraries in the Perl ecosystem, DateTime.pm (first release in 2003, 3,774 transitive dependents, https://metacpan.org/release/DateTime) and Log::Dispatch (first release in 1999, 1,043 transitive, https://metacpan.org/release/Log-Dispatch). I've also created or contributed to dozens of other packages in the Perl ecosystem, some of them very widely used, including at places like Amazon (to this day).
During Perl's peak in the early 2000's, I'd guess there were easily dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of companies using code I'd created. Some of the bigger Perl companies these days include Craigslist, Booking.com, CPanel, Bluehost, and Grant Street Group. Many of these companies have been around for quite a long time.
Starting in 2008 I began adding a DONATIONS section to my package documentation, like https://metacpan.org/pod/DateTime#DONATIONS. Over time, I've added this to nearly everything I maintain.
Unfortunately PayPal doesn't provide stats going back to 2008, but at a best guess I'd say I've received about $2,000-5,000 dollars over 12 years or so. The largest donation I ever received was $500. Most donations are in the $1-50 range. None of the companies I mentioned above have ever donated anything, though they have all contributed to The Perl Foundation in the form of conference sponsorship.
So that's a long-winded way of saying that I don't sustain myself on open source. This is a pretty common story. Companies rarely make an effort to support individual developers. They will support language/project foundations, but that money isn't going to be directly divvied up among library developers for the language.
Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#260I've been maintaining Chart.js [0] since 2014. I only work on it during my free time (evenings and weekends) to avoid any problems with my day job. Conflict with my day job is also one of the reasons why I don't take donations. There is some benefit to that though because it allows me to take a day/week/month off if I need it without feeling guilty. Once there is money involved, there are a lot more expectations and…
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