Ideally, if I am going to put in the massive amount of effort, I'd like to at least have the potential to get paid for the effort. Let me stress, getting paid is not the primary reason. I learn code bases and write code because I love the art.
Any advice from serious open source contributors?
1) You work on an open source project and an altruistic company hires you to keep working on it. This is ideal, and I've only ever seen it once (Sendmail hired a couple of core contributors to keep making Sendmail awesome back in the 90s).
2) You work on an open source project, people see the work because they use the project, and then offer you a job to keep working on the project, but slowly over time you are working less on things that are great for the community and more on things that are great for your company. I've seen this a lot.
3) You get hired by a company that uses a big project, and they ask you to start making modifications that are useful for the company. It turns out what you did was useful for everyone so you contribute it back. Sometimes it turns out to be a huge win and so you keep working on it. I saw this with Cassandra and some of the folks at Netflix.
4) You create a cool project and your company lets you open source it. It becomes well known and then other companies want to hire you for either 1, 2 or 3. I saw this a couple times were people left Netflix to go to Facebook or Google to continue work on an OSS project.
If you work on Chromium or Firefox, you'll pretty much be limited to Google or the Mozilla foundation (with some exceptions). So if you want to do it to learn some great code but don't have a particular project that you love, I'd suggest one of the more infrastructure projects that are widely deployed if you want to increase potential job prospects.
In summary: There are lots of ways to get paid to write OSS, but you may not like them all.
https://journal.dedasys.com/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-scarcity...
At GitLab we hired more than 10 people that first contributed to the project voluntarily. Including our CI lead Kamil and VP of Engineering Stan Hu. Our last hire that joined this way was Clement Ho that was an MVP (most valuable volunteer) on August 22nd, 2016.
(BTW I love GitLab and you guys are doing!)
Number 2 is: "you are working less on things that are great for the community and more on things that are great for your company" => I hope that at GitLab everything we do is good for the community. There is a split between working on great things that end up in the community edition and great things that end up in the enterprise edition (proprietary). Part of the community is using the enterprise edition, so those things are good for the community but at a reduced level. But I hope they are always things everyone can get excited about.
Another great example of a company like this is Sentry[1], which is fully open source, although I'm not sure if they've hired anyone from the community so far.
I got hired by a company that uses a big project. Several years later I had the opportunity to move to a team that does upstream open source work, and did.
Bu I guess the number of such projects are relatively small.
Why would you need to ask for permission to open source your side project? Is that always the case?
My major source of income is my "Varnish Moral License" (see: http://phk.freebsd.dk/VML/index.html)
It is not particularly easy to shake money loose, but I'm making a living and I'm trying to explain to the world that free software is not the same as gratis software.
(See for instance: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2636165)
As others have pointed out, the browsers are all backed by actual organizations with employees, so that will probably be a tough row to hoe, unless the end goal is to get employed by one of them.
And to answer the inevitable question: many of my paid features are also available as 3rd party OSS plugins. Many companies prefer to pay for the commercial version so they know the features will all work well together and be supported years from now.
You've added new features to Sidekiq Pro over time -- do you think your business would have been viable had you started with no (or very few) additional paid features?
I started Sidekiq Pro with just two major features: batches and metrics. http://www.mikeperham.com/2012/10/01/say-hello-to-sidekiq-pr... The rest have come out of customer feedback and demand.
I'd guess it's his full-time job now.
Another person worth looking at would be Eric Holscher, who's Twitter feed frequently has interesting insights into running an open source project as your full-time job[4].
The best bet if you want to do open source full-time would be to work at a company like GitLab[5] or Sentry[6], but that does restrict the exact kinds of open source work you can do (at least during working hours).
[1]: https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand [2]: http://www.fordfoundation.org/library/reports-and-studies/ro... [3]: https://changelog.com/rfc [4]: https://twitter.com/ericholscher/status/752572876138565632 [5]: https://about.gitlab.com/ [6]: https://sentry.io/
Once payroll rolls out contributors set their own compensation.
Some more information on that can be found here: https://gratipay.com/about/features/payroll
Previously Gratipay was Gittip, and worked much like Patreon - essentially a donation or ~tip~ system.
There's still some work to be done, but I've been following this project for awhile. I've been working full time now on other stuff, but I keep up with their updates, and Chad (founder) is a great dude.
Incidentally, previous experience with the specific codebase isn't necessarily a requirement to get a job working on a project: if you have general experience in the field and can work with an open source community then these both transfer over (this is how I got into working on QEMU). Learning a new codebase is something that you typically have to do when you start a new job in the closed source world, after all...
I'm a software engineer at Google, where I've contributed to Google Servlet Engine, Omaha (https://github.com/google/omaha), Firefox, Chromium, and Android, among other open-source projects.
Some of these are closed-source projects that were later open-sourced, some are developed in the open, and some are run as a hybrid between the two. I also develop random crap on the weekends, and Google gives us wide latitude to open-source that work if we want.
I recognize you're asking whether one can start with open-source contributions and eventually receive compensation for it. I'm answering that in my case I am compensated for a job that happens to involve lots of open-source contributions, which is the same end result but starting from a different place.
I was hired based on knowledge gained from dealing with the projects, implementing features in said projects, or literally just deploying the software in large challenging environments. And this was for stuff I contributed to in my free time for fun! OSS <3
https://github.com/mesosphere/marathon/issues/created_by/SEJ... :)
https://github.com/saltstack/salt/commits?author=SEJeff
And an infrastructure metrics tool named Graphite (maybe you've heard of it?):
https://github.com/graphite-project/graphite-web/commits?aut...
https://github.com/graphite-project/whisper/commits?author=S...
https://github.com/graphite-project/carbon/commits?author=SE...
Along with being a former volunteer Sysadmin for gnome.org (yes I used to have root on gnome.org for the Linux nerds out there) and knowing a lot of open source maintainers by nature of meeting them at tech conferences.
We pay our developers to help us build it and we are currently hiring an Android dev. http://ie.indeed.com/job/android-developer-passion-human-rig...
Code is here: https://github.com/securityfirst
So I'm here to tell that friends or family aren't always the worst possible clients. If you both know what you're talking about, and are well organized, and define precisely what's the price for each task, it can be a great experience.
today the project has 900 stars on Github and a lengthy Smashing Magazine page :)
More info here: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/07/how-i-ended-up-with...
Note that this doesn't have to involve doing a PhD or actually being an academic - it's more a providing the tools that enable academics to do successful research kind of thing.
Learn/money idea to what you want is to get a job where open source is welcome, cherished and used. Internships are good to try it out. HIIT in Finland was such place and I interned there, and the result is here: https://github.com/wkoszek/freebsd_netfpga So I've got $$$ for stay + food + cinema for hacking project which I knew we'd publish and I learned a bunch.
If you're not for a rich country, Google Code In and Google Summer of Code be an option. You get a $5000 stipend for spending your summer at home hacking code, you get a decent mentor from a project you're interested in and you get experience.
Another model is to reach out to projects which are backed by a legal body. For example the FreeBSD Foundation helps and support the FreeBSD Project, and they have sponsored projects. If you're good in FreeBSD and have an idea, I feel there'd be some $$$ if you can deliver something useful. FreeBSD has feature idea pages and if you see a fit, you could just ping people and start collaborating.
Last, and I think the hardest, is to start hacking good code in a product you see is (1) open-source (2) backed by a company. I don't know how many hiring managers are techies merging pull requests etc., but even through individual engineers you can get a reference. After 10th pull request accepted by a guy who reviewed your stuff and with whom you've worked, I feel like it's easier to shoot "Are you hiring? I NEED THE MONEYZ!" email.
- I grew up in a family without a lot of money, by using open-source software growing up I got to learn a lot of different aspects of digital production, sofware development, and try software I never would have had the opportunity to try if it hadn't been open source. This was incredibly formative in shaping my skill set today, so I have a lot of past open-source contributers to thank for where I find myself today
- I believe businesses have a responsibility to the community in which they operate and where their employees live. This is corporate stewardship, for a big business maaybe they invest in a local school, or sponsor kids sports teams or summer camp. I'm a freelancer, so I wont be sponsoring any sports teams, but I feel its important for my 1-man business to give back in a 1-man-sized way!
So with those two things in mind, a desire to give back to open source, and a desire to help the community I come from - I have tried to find challenging new work that pushes the limits of current technology. I stretches me as a learner & worker, it provides a solution for a problem that meets the clients needs, and if I can find a way to give the solution I came up with back to the community, then others can save time and money by using my work as a springboard for their own solutions.
I write and release lots of use cases and examples demonstrating techniques and solutions, and pour a lot of time, and even some of my own money into getting them out there!
If your aim was to help a project like the Firefox project, and you wanted to be paid for your time - I would try to find a client who has an ee case not currently supported by Firefox, having them pay you to solve their problem, and also arrange that your solution can be sent back to Firefox and included in their codebase. Its a win/win/win for you, the client, and Firefox, plus a bonus win for all Firefox users at the same time!
I work in Open Source and there are plenty of companies that build their business around a product and hire at market rates, normally they have a SaaS model of operation, but you'll have to set your sights a little lower than Chrome or Firefox. These companies include Ghost, Mongo, Elastic, Basho, Cockroach Labs, Automattic (Wordpress), Silverstripe, and countless more.
Another way to do it is to do postgraduate work at a university and get a grant, I know people who work on the Rust compiler in this capacity.
And of course, if you're starting a new project, there's the Kickstarter model - followed by, for eg., Neovim, Chocolatey, etc.
[1] https://www.bountysource.com/ [2] http://alternativeto.net/software/bountysource/
github.com/kubernetes/minikube
I'd highly recommend it, although I believe enrollment in a university is required for eligibility.
There are usually 3 kinds of paid contributors we see: 1. Companies scratching their own itch while we maintain it
2. People I hire to work on the project
3. Phd students technically on a stipend doing their research with us (we do AI)
Another possibility is a 3rd party company paying someone to add a pull request to an open source project whether that be us or others.
If I need something fixed or added to a FOSS project for $WORK, that's work related and it's perfectly reasonable to do so.
Now getting someone else to pay you is a much bigger stretch. Outside of a couple people who work for really big companies that market commercial versions (or support packages) for FOSS projects, I don't know of anyone that gets paid to work on FOSS.
I'm the one in charge so it's pretty easy to convince myself.
The long term value of contributing back to a FOSS project means not having to maintain your own fork.
That's what it really comes down to and companies either get it or they don't. The dumber ones think that their three-line fix to an obscure JS library will be a competitive advantage instead of the white elephant it truly is.
I had met some people from the company a couple of times and wrote something they wanted adapted to work with their products but didn't want to invest in it.
A few thousand to get me to do something I was going to do anyway at some point was a good way for them to get something that they wouldn't monetise directly.
Not sure how to get a gig like that though :)
I don't know a lot about the frontend OSS world, but I know that if you pick a project that has a lot of money being thrown around (in large deployments, for example) then you'll find that it's easier to get some of it to land in your pocket. Niche projects are difficult to get paid for, but can be good places to learn; smaller projects may be happy to have some help and will lend more guidance when you ask questions. But, then again, some big projects have people specifically tasked with bringing new developers up to speed and "community management", so that may even out that difference.
It will never hurt you to have OSS contributions on your resume. It's gotten me jobs, and has allowed me to round up good paying contract work when I've needed it (even in unrelated fields; I've recently done some Ruby work, even though I've never had a real project in Ruby). And, as someone who has hired people, I can say I've only ever hired people who had OSS work I could see. Sometimes unrelated to what I was hiring for, sometimes they were already working on what I was hiring for and I just wanted them to be able to spend more time on it and get them on board with the company road map.
All that said, it's not the easiest way to make a living in software. Getting a real job is probably the easiest way, and if you're lucky you'll get to work on OSS stuff to one degree or another. I've worked on tons of stuff that I never got paid for, and don't expect to ever get paid for. And, if you aren't really directing your efforts toward making something pay, you're unlikely to find that it'll pay.
OSS contribution does not, in the general case, lead to getting paid. But, it can lead there if you want it to.
Basically the idea is that the code is open and free, but if someone uses it a lot to make money they pay you a licensing fee.
- What is a user?
- Why is it not applicable for library code (and libraries are *the* important assets in dev)?
- What is a plugin?