There is a dead comment that not so nicely stated that large companies are the biggest funders to open source. This doesn't seem too far off... anyone have any data?
Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
31–40 of 318 posts
Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#32[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#33I'm a computer science PhD student, and I mostly maintain/create open source projects (https://github.com/lengstrom/) in the evenings for fun --- its particularly great you're working with friends!
I've never viewed it as a potential full time job. However, I recently got GitHub sponsors and make about 5$ a month!
Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#34Alex Ellis here - the author of Inlets and OpenFaaS.
If you want to work on Open Source as a full-time career, the best option is to find a company that is working on or invested in an OSS project and join that team.
Examples: VMware contribute heavily to Kubernetes. As do Azure, and a myriad of other companies from large to small. I tried this option, it has pros and cons, if you go for this one, let's hope you like politics and corporate jargon.
The question is - what does "full time open source" mean to you? To me, it means work on independent projects. Unfortunately that alone is not financially sustainable in the long term. You may be able to drain down your savings for a few months, but then you're going to be left feeling a little down and out.
Options for independent OSS work are a little rough, read this from 2019 if you're a project lead and think that somehow the community or users will pay your way just because they use the software in critical systems, spoiler - they won't - the reason they are using your software is because it's free: https://blog.alexellis.io/the-5-pressures-of-leadership/
If you have your own projects that you want to work on, you'll need to find a revenue stream.
This is what I wrote up for those considering going independent: "What you need to know before you go freelance" - https://levelup.gitconnected.com/what-you-need-to-know-befor...
Options which clearly do not work: sponsorship, donations, asking users to support you, offering commercial support as a single-person company
Options that do work: Job at big-co (you won't work on your own projects, but theirs, or their interests). Working for yourself as an independent consultant, and taking a "pay cut" to contribute to OSS as and when you feel like it. You could also create a paid product and use this to find some "time off paid work", which is essentially what OSS is. That product could be based-upon the OSS you want to build, or not.
I do have a GitHub Sponsors account, but I run it as a value-add subscription, not as a donation platform. https://github.com/sponsors/alexellis - starting a consulting business from scratch is not easy, especially in global lock-down and a spending freeze. This, eventually may provide a buffer to pay the monthly accountancy and company costs.
Longer term plan for my business is to capitalise on product and consulting practice. Open Source will be "in the car", but not in the driving seat.
The question for you is - what do you think it means to "work on open source full-time", why do you want that and what are the alternatives?
Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#35Basically 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'…
The first path is the only way I ever got hard cash for open source. There are plenty companies that create only or mostly open source work in addition to the 2 mentioned: Igalia, Linaro, Collabora, Intel, AMD, Endless, SuSE, to name a few. Some scientific research is happening in the open source manner as well.
While none of my stuff made outside a contract ever yielded money, I also never made it a goal.
Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#36I have been a free maintainer for the last 10 years and I find this topic quite fascinating.
I have gathered links about it here: https://bzg.github.io/opensource-challenges
Oh, and you can support my FLOSS contributions through Github: https://github.com/sponsors/bzg
Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#37This is a really tricky question, I am helping several open source projects with a huge number of stars and downloads. I did more than 500 PRs and most of them in popular projects. And I have to say a not popular phrase - in most cases, OSS is not a story about big money. Even more, it is really hard to replace a full-time job by working on OSS. After almost 3 years involving in OOS, I noticed the following things:
1. In most cases, the popular OOS project has a team in some large companies, for instance, React (Facebook), Angular (Google), VSCode (Microsoft), etc. and that's mean that code is open-sourced however a key decision made by an internal team.
2. A donation can help you to buy a cup of coffee (or tea), however, not replace your full-time job.
3. If we are talking about Github sponsors, the idea is really good, however, if you are located in one of the following countries https://github.com/sponsors#countries, which is not my case, and I think my country won't be supported in near future.
4. To be involved in OSS is not guarantee tons of interesting job offers. In most cases, a good LinkedIn profile can be much helpful than good Github profile, and yes - to have good Github profile need to make something important every day that others can see your involvement, which takes more your spare time instead of adding several motivation phrases to LinkedIn profile for HRs.
5. OSS is a community and that's mean an opportunity to meet some interesting people.
Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#38I’m responsible for a few repos, probably the most famous one being github.com/stretchr/testify. My solution is that as much as I love open source and the community I’m in, I do not let it get in the way of work and family. I’ll only contribute when I have spare time. Unless I were to be paid for it.
As someone who uses testify at work and at home on personal projects, I just want to say Thanks for a great tool.
Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#39You might be able to make money by providing customised solutions to your clients using open source software.
If your open source product can be run as a SaaS, you might be able to make money by providing no-hassle hosting (think Ghost or WordPress).
Another option might be providing a open source core and then selling additional closed-source features (e.g. GitLab)
But if you simply want to sell your open source product to customers so they can run it themselves, then it's impossible. It's a dream for many developers and there are some success stories, but they are always the exception not the norm.
Solutions like selling support, or even worse, charging for documention, are simply unappealing to both developers and users.
There is another option - one that some open source advocates dislike: source-only products i.e. you sell you software product to customers to run them themselves. You give them the source code of your product so they can customise it to meet their needs. But the software is not open source and cannot be shared the way open source can.
There are actually lots of successful source-only products that are sustaining their creators full-time. Two examples: Craft CMS and Kirby CMS - both publish their source code on GitHub and rely on the honesty of their customers to pay (which they do). They have a thriving community of developers making plugins and extensions - proving that you can create a community of developers around a 'source-only' product.
Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
They do not need to do that, they just get a report from the banks and ask you to declare your income.
I suspect you are European.
In the USA, any non-shady organization will send you a 1099- report of how much income you generated. You're supposed to submit that form when you do your taxes, which is kind of dumb, because a copy of the 1099 was already sent to the IRS. USA tax filing is not efficient for reasons...
gives Intuit the stink eye