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Comment by abhinai | Hacker News Reader

Are there any benefits to being a free software maintainer beyond the obvious pride and satisfaction that comes with the role? For example, is this something that people mention on their resumes? Does getting a job become easier and when you do, can you negotiate higher salaries?

Our world is incredibly indebted to Free Software Maintainers and I wonder how we can pay them back in our little ways.

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When I interview someone who is a free software maintainer then it's a really big plus because this shows me that they can handle maintainer ship which infers a lot of good qualities, from small facts like that they probably know git well and write good commit messages, to the fact that they know how to handle people in difficult situations when a inexperienced maintainer would let bad code slip in but a experienced one will fight for good solutions.

In my limited experience, I'm not sure it's an advantage.

You do get to break the ice faster during interviews and contacting new clients. But it can easily backfire as well: people will ask why "project X" is not up to their coding standards, why you didn't contribute to "X" and/or why "X" has not been fixed yet.

Not everybody seem to grasp this notion that these might not be professional products.

I often discuss with my friends that do not have any public projects to show off during interviews. It really doesn't seem to affect the outcome, unless the company in itself is interested in one of your projects (which is pretty rare considering the breadth of OSS).

I have a page dedicated to my Open Source projects in my CV pointing to GitHub repos. I got hired to my last job without doing any homework or whiteboard programming because I had enough code to show.

People can use sites like Open Collective, Patreon or the likes to directly pay open source projects or people involved with them. There's a lot of different platforms for this and I don't even know half of them. If there's a project you'd like to support, check if they take monetary contributions somewhere and if not, maybe suggest it to them and start donating :)

This is about free software, not open source software.

The "free" in free software is about freedom, not getting stuff free-of-charge.

English has a serious problem with ambiguity around the word "free". In the closely related Scandinavian languages, there is a difference between "fri" (as in freedom) and "gratis" (as in free of charge). Unlike in English, the Latin borrowing "gratis" is the common everyday word for things that are free of charge. Free software is known as "fri programvare", whereas free-of-charge software (a.k.a. freeware) is "gratis programvare".

In German there are at least 3 words that describe these somewhat related concepts. The word "Frei" is mostly meant as in freedom but can also describe absence of something. The latter form is usually used in compound words like "kostenfrei" which means "free of charge" however, most of those words can also be compound with "los" like in "kostenlos" which means the same thing and is used more often in this case. We also use "gratis" but mostly if something is given complimentary in addition to something else. Something like "buy one get one free" for example. Then we also have "umsonst" which is actually not related but commonly used by people to mean the same thing as "kostenlos". However, it really means "for nothing" like in "ich habe vermutlich all das umsonst aufgeschrieben" or "i probably wrote all of this up for nothing". So the differentiation between getting something for free and something being free (as in freedom) is quite clear. However, there is no german word for freeware as far as i can tell and nobody i know says something like "Freie Software" instead of "free software" or "kostenlose software" instead of "freeware" but that might be caused by my circle and is more often used then i recognized :)

I would not be where I am without my involvement in OSS or other projects, mostly due to the gained experience. The "trick" about putting it on your resume is, if it's significant, to make it not sound or placed any less worthy than any other experience on there (possibly also avoiding terms like "free", "personal", etc)

It can definitely get you in the door to an interview.

Of course, one of the questions will be "uh so you know you won't be able to contribute to open source much here?"

I noted in another response, but will note it here as well:

I've had some challenging discussions that have made me rethink how I solve problems, and have resulted in deep dives that I would otherwise not have made. ultimately, that helps me, not just those using the software. so, there's a net positive that's sometimes overlooked.

I maintain a small library of additional classes for JUCE. I was paid to make some improvements to some of the classes that turned into a small consulting gig.

All my consulting work is JUCE based, so having a library of my work is helpful. But what I do is a very niche field. I don't know if this would apply in general.

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