How does one become a full time open source dev? do they get paid? who pays them? I mean it makes sense that if lots of people/companies depend on the project that they SHOULD get paid.
Of course, there are some in-house tasks. But still, I spent a lot of time participating in the upstream community and became a committer after about one year's contribution.
That said, after I changed my job, my engagement decreased considerably. But my following jobs are mostly still full-time OSS developers:
* PingCAP for TiDB and TiKV. I wrote its dev guide and built its (new) governance.
* StreamNative for Apache Pulsar.
* Greptime for GreptimeDB.
Many (infra) software MUST BE open source today. You may see my explanation at https://www.tisonkun.com/blog/greptimedb-community-report#su....
1. What do you consider success? Is this less than, equal to, or greater than the amount you pay on rent/mortgage?
2. Are you building user-facing applications for a non-technical user base, or infrastructure code for a technical user base?
3. How much of your success, do you think, is based on the novelty you offer through occasional nsfw pics?