Recommendations for building a career in open source
opensource.com
opensource.com
What did I get from this? It gave me the flexibility to work for any company I want. It allowed me to meet some big startup founders.
That sounds great but I probably spent 4000 hours over 5 years on open source. If I had used that time to do extra contract work on the side, I could easily have earned $300k. I could have used the money to buy a house. Instead I have very little savings.
Open source is not worth it as a career. Only do it if you love it. Don't expect it to pay. Your project can have thousands of stars on GitHub and have thousands of users but it doesn't translate to much. The average Facebook or Google employee probably gets about the same amount and quality of career opportunities as I do... If not better. But they have savings, they own Facebook stock.
Career wise there is no doubt that open source is a mistake. And I'm actually one of the lucky ones... Most open source projects never get popular enough have any community around it at all.
Like the author said, it's all about networking. Don't bother writing code... Just blog about other people's open source work and meet people and you will succeed.
I'm currently working to monetize my open source project with https://baasil.io/ (with some cofounders) - The surprising thing I learned is that investors do NOT care AT ALL that your OSS project has almost 20k downloads per month and that you spent 3+ years of your life on it and are fully dedicated to it. Employers care, other developers care, but to an investor, it means nothing.
I applied to a startup incubator in Sydney several months ago; I showed them all my project stats (it's probably one of the most popular open source frameworks to come out of Australia). I hussled hard; I even managed to get tickets to a few investor conferences and events and, each time, I would talk to every person in the room. I ended up securing a coffee meeting with an investor (after talking to him at two different events; 3 if you count the fact that I had actually talked to the guy on the phone 2 years before about what I was planning to do; so he knew I was serious) and he recommended that I apply to an incubator in which he was a director.
I applied; but I didn't even end up getting into the first round of interviews (they just didn't understand the product or the market)! They selected a bunch of other startups (some of which didn't even have a proof of concept to show).
Maybe the experience would have been different in another country.
I think an investor would care more if it were making money, or if there was a way to make money. I think charging is a great way to demonstrate that.
You could also just add a voluntary payment and see if people just send some money your way.
The words "career" and "open-source" should not go together. Unless by career, one means working for free, on unpaid projects, without [local] peers.
There are few companies (Google, Facebook, IBM, RedHat, ...) that do open-source and a career there would be fine. But that's probably not what people think when they're talking about working for open source.
This sums it up pretty well.
I guess OSS is only for people who really love OSS not just think its cool.
Basically, they don't, except for a few exceptions. Some small minority gets to do it as a full-time career because they either 1) work for a company that has an open-source business model of some kind (such as Magento, which is open-source but the code is uncommented and difficult to understand, so they sell services in customizing it for e-shop owners), or 2) work for a company or foundation that large corporations fund in order to advance open-source infrastructure (e.g. The Linux Foundation, people at Intel working on Linux drivers for Intel hardware, etc.). And maybe 3) they work in some capacity at a university and do open-source work that way. Everyone else does it for free in their spare time. And they're doing it less and less it seems; notice that FOSS's heyday was really back in the early 2000s: sourceforge, freshmeat, etc. were all hot sites back then, and there was all kinds of new open-source software coming out constantly. Now it's stagnating: the generation that was interested in this stuff has gotten old, become middle-aged, and gotten married and maybe had kids, so they don't have free time for that stuff any more. The younger generation, by and large, isn't picking up the slack (probably because the economy is shit and they're all working on their "side hustle" because they're rightfully paranoid about making enough money to maintain their standard of living in the face of ever-increasing rents).
Sometimes you're lucky enough to get paid to work on opensource projects or projects you've worked on become opensource.
I've built a career on open source technologies, mainly as a hobby that I turned into a job :)
I think the natural trajectory for a developer can be something like:
1. Work on it as a hobby
2. Hobby gets a bit too serious
3. Start charging an hourly fee
4. Get hired by company sponsor or start company