For those of you in the HN community that get paid to work on open source full-time or almost full-time, while still making a decent income, how do you do it?
Ask HN: Getting paid to work on open source full-time?
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Re: Ask HN: Getting paid to work on open source full-time?
#2for a year or two i worked for mulesource, who make the open-source mule esb (these days, if you visit their site, i think there's more not-so-open stuff as they try to make money, but back in the day it was pretty much open source + paid support).
anyway, i got that job by using mule in my previous job, and writing some blog posts explaining it - mainly intended for my co-workers, but i posted them on the net. that, plus providing patches / feedback, led to them offering me a job (and it was a good job in may ways - very smart people, and i learnt a lot).
which is all pretty much what you'd imagine people to say (get involved in a project that has money to pay developers), so nothing very new here....
Re: Ask HN: Getting paid to work on open source full-time?
#3That's an incredibly broad question. I built my own business around a niche and established a client base through this while also doing jobs on the side that come about through that business.
Re: Ask HN: Getting paid to work on open source full-time?
#4You can work on academic projects funded by public money. The results are open source.
Ours, in bioinformatics: http://intermine.org
Re: Ask HN: Getting paid to work on open source full-time?
#5I don't exactly get paid to work on open-source, since our startup is still looking for our first customer(s), but my approach to attempt this, was to start an open-source startup.
So, I founded Fogbeam Labs[1], started writing code, eventually recruited a couple of co-founders, wrote more code, networked a lot, pimped the startup shamelessly at every turn, and ...
... TBD.
All joking aside, the end of this story hasn't been written yet. But we're pretty optimistic. We made some great connections at the All Things Open conference in Raleigh last week, and our content marketing strategy has paid off in that a trickle of inbound leads has been coming in. We're also looking at a sort of not-quite-a-pivot-but-something-like-that (call it a "swivel" instead, maybe?) where we're probably going to bump up the prioritization on releasing some SaaS applications built on the fundamental technologies we've been working on.
On a semi-related note, I actually do get paid to work with if not always on Open Source, by virtue of consulting at Open Software Integrators[2]. We specialize in helping companies with deployments of things like Tomcat, JBoss, MongoDB, Hadoop, Neo4J, etc.
Re: Ask HN: Getting paid to work on open source full-time?
#6That's an incredibly broad question. I built my own business around a niche and established a client base through this while also doing jobs on the side that come about through that business.
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Re: Ask HN: Getting paid to work on open source full-time?
#7I work at Cloudera. We work on Hadoop, HDFS, and other open source technologies full-time.
Re: Ask HN: Getting paid to work on open source full-time?
#8This is a perrenial question that (I think) is very important to a lot of people.
I wish there were some kind of website or book that would answer the question, "Who is getting paid to work on open source, and by whom?"
There is good data for the Linux kernel, for example. On lwn.net you can always see the % contribution of each company. Presumably you could mine the kernel git repo to find out how many people that actually constitutes.
Getting this kind of data for other large/famous projects should be possible.
If anyone has pointers to something like this, please speak up.
EDIT: I guess an important metric would be, "For Company X, what % of code is open source vs. closed source." It would be nice to work at a company that is 100% open or reasonably close, other things being equal (which they aren't, but my point still stands).
EDIT2: I think providing a centralized site that collects these metrics and also allows people to submit them for smaller project/companies, would be awesome and very useful. Possibly even Kickstarter worthy.
Re: Ask HN: Getting paid to work on open source full-time?
#9You can work on academic projects funded by public money. The results are open source. Ours, in bioinformatics: http://intermine.org
The results can be open source, but do not have to be, even if funded by public money.
For example, d3.js is open source, but the code for PageRank and its related search engine is not. When I was a grad students, I worked on projects funded by NSF and DARPA where the code and data were not released. So it totally depends.
Some professors and grad students care more about releasing software into the public, while others don't care or don't bother writing reliable code.
Re: Ask HN: Getting paid to work on open source full-time?
#10You can work on academic projects funded by public money. The results are open source. Ours, in bioinformatics: http://intermine.org
Just curious how would one go about getting involved in something like this?
I'm looking for a topic for a masters thesis/possible job?