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Comment by ricardobeat | Hacker News Reader

These always ignore the possibility that a large % of OSS development happens during working hours at an existing employer. Very few projects are led by devs who decided to do OSS full time without an existing income source.

Some real numbers on this would be nice to have too. If you've seen any research in this area please share.

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> These always ignore the fact that a large chunk (maybe the majority?) of OSS development happens during working hours at an existing employer.

Do you have any sources for this? It doesn’t seem right to make a vague statement (a large chunk) which sounds bad, nor a somewhat less vague conjecture (maybe the majority?) without sources.

In my very limited experience, any developer who is significantly supporting OSS with code contributions is a high contributor for their employer, and if they don’t always do the agreed-upon number of hours/week for their employer, I doubt it’s far off. So I disagree with you anecdotally, which doesn’t matter much, and I question your sources, which matters more.

Fair point, edited to be less vague. These statements are based on my own observations. Would love to see a poll in 'the state of X' style regarding who contributes to OSS or not.

I think what they meant is that a lot of popular open source projects are maintained/created originally by companies. So, Facebook created React. FB devs are, i assume, paid for working on React, even though it doesn't directly benefit FB itself (they aren't writing a new messenger feature, for example)

For every React there are 1000 other open source projects run entirely by volunteers.

I am curious if there is actual data on the number of man-hours that are spent on open source per year, and how many of those are funded by corporations. My guess is that it is less than 1%.

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