I work at Yahoo and I'm a front-end engineer on the YUI Team. My job is to work on a number of open source projects such as YUI [1], Pure [2], and Mojito [3].
[1] github.com/yui/yui3 [2] github.com/yui/pure [3] github.com/yahoo/mojito
Ask HN: Getting paid to work on open source full-time?
41–50 of 69 posts
Re: Ask HN: Getting paid to work on open source full-time?
#42Lots of people in thread are discussing about becoming a primary contributor to an open source product. I think there's an easier way, and it worked for me. I found a company that builds an open source product, applied, and impressed them enough to get hired. This seems far more direct.
edit: there is a downside. My job frankly isn't much different than many other software jobs; it just so happens that the output is open source. I still have a boss, we still have company priorities (though I help set them!) and strategic goals, etc. I don't get to just fuck around and work on whatever I want. So you should be careful: if what you want is the latter (work on whatever you want, get paid), you probably need to be someone like Linus. That said, the project I work on is damn cool and my job is better (for me; I don't think jobs are good but rather the tuple can be good) than almost anything else I can imagine.
edit2: I'm unfortunately not listing the company name because there are some real dicks on HN; you can probably figure it out if you're really interested but please don't post it.
Re: Ask HN: Getting paid to work on open source full-time?
#43This is one path: http://www.mozilla.org/careers
Partial proof: https://github.com/mozilla/repositories https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/repositories
(that's 30 _pages_ of github repos, not including the stuff we do that's not on github: http://mxr.mozilla.org/)
Re: Ask HN: Getting paid to work on open source full-time?
#44I don't get paid to work on open source full-time (only part-time), but I do know a number of people whose full-time job is contributing to open-source projects like Chrome or Android. The way to do it is to find an open-source project which is strategically important to a company, and yet which can't be made proprietary without destroying its strategic value. For example, the reason Android is open-source is because…
I disagree with you regarding Android. Albeit a different platform, thats a bit like saying Windows was never a success and couldn't be because it was closed source and no one wanted to work with them.
In a world where Android didn't exist as an open source solution, if the value proposition was high enough, there still could have been a chance a closed source license OS could have succeeded. We'll never really know.
Re: Ask HN: Getting paid to work on open source full-time?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love your comment, but I disagree with your assessment of LiveJournal in the last paragraph. The reason Facebook beat LiveJournal had nothing to do with their ability to use memcached or other open infrastructure developed by the LJ/Danga team. It likely had a lot more to do with Six Apart, resources, energy, etc.
I don't think memcached was the specific reason Facebook beat LiveJournal, but I think a general hemorrhaging of competitive advantage and failure to secure additional resources was, and I think a large reason for the latter was the former. It's not really any one competitor or technology responsible for it, but the combined effect of it. Whenever anything went wrong with LJ - server issues, PR headaches, unpopular f…
The Affero GPL is partly motivated by this use case. It doesn't fully solve the problem, but it means that your competitor who grabbed your code base and set up an open-source clone, will at least have to keep open-sourcing all their stuff, too, leveling the playing field a bit. Alternately, it can serve as a kind of poison-pill to keep some competitors and would-be competitors from using your tech.
Re: Ask HN: Getting paid to work on open source full-time?
#46I used to work at Sourcefabric (sourcefabric.org) which pays you to work on open-source projects. They have offices in Berlin, Prague, Toronto and Romania.
Re: Ask HN: Getting paid to work on open source full-time?
#47This 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 a…
It would be awesome if we could add a new "Who's Hiring?" thread each month but an open-source edition. i.e. any company or startup, large or small could advertise the open source project they are will to pay people to work on, if it is part-time or full-time and whether it is on-site or remote.
Please do it
Re: Ask HN: Getting paid to work on open source full-time?
#48I'm sorry that I can't tell you how to get paid to work on oss but great question! I suggest to watch the first part of Aaron @tenderlove Patterson's closing keynote at Rails Conf 2013[1], that touches upon this topic. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kgUL_FfUZY
in a related note a friend of mine that's rails core member is interested in getting a job working full-time in rails, anyone want to hire him?
Re: Ask HN: Getting paid to work on open source full-time?
#49RedHat?
Re: Ask HN: Getting paid to work on open source full-time?
#50This is one path: http://www.mozilla.org/careers Partial proof: https://github.com/mozilla/repositories https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/repositories (that's 30 _pages_ of github repos, not including the stuff we do that's not on github: http://mxr.mozilla.org/ )
Case in point: Source code for the careers site linked above can be found at https://github.com/mozilla/lumbergh/ (we just recently released a redesign, yay!)