

Ask HN: People doing open-source development full-time - kia

Is it possible to make a living doing open-source development full-time? How do these great people make money for living?
======
gregschlom
Some examples:

\- Hires: You start an open-source project, it gets some nice traction, a
company start using your code in production, but they want to make sure you
spend your time working on the project. They hire you to work full time on it.
So you're technically employed by the company, but all the community is
benefiting from your work.

\- Consulting: you sell consulting services for your project, or an hosted
implementation (think MongoDB or Wordpress, for example)

\- Sponsorship: you get sponsored either by a company that has an interest in
the project (but you're not an employee of the company), or by universities /
research grants / etc... I think Nokia sponsors some KDE developers, for
example. The European Union also spends some money sponsoring open-source
projects.

\- Donations (from individuals or corporations). Either in money, or in
hardware / software / services / etc... Usually not a good way to make a
living, as a developer, though.

One thing is for sure: it is definetely possible to make money with open
source. But more likely as a project (ie: you found a company that develops a
piece of technology which is open-source), than as a developer (ie: you're not
very likely to make a living of being a regular contributor to open source
projects)

~~~
philwelch
_You start an open-source project, it gets some nice traction, a company start
using your code in production, but they want to make sure you spend your time
working on the project. They hire you to work full time on it._

It must be difficult in this situation to keep the needs of other users in
mind, if one user in particular is paying you to maintain the project. How
does this usually pan out?

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iampims
Salvatore Sanfilippo, creator of Redis, has been hired by VMWare to work on
Redis full-time. The development pace surged as a result. Joyent did the same
with Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js

It’s possible, but keep in mind that those two are great developers, not
everybody can do what they did.

------
sandGorgon
Rich Hickey of Clojure
([http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/...](http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/cc77df25e98ce46b?pli=1))

Matt Mackall of Mercurial, before it was acquired
([http://selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial/2010-April/031543.htm...](http://selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial/2010-April/031543.html))

~~~
tsmall
Thanks for the link to Rich Hickey's post. How software development should be
funded is something I've been thinking about for a while now, and I hadn't
come across that link yet. He gives a good summary of the existing situation.
(For anyone interested, it's also reprinted on the Clojure website [1].)

I tend to agree with the points that Bradley Kuhn makes in one of his blog
posts [2], but I'm still trying to figure out how direct payment for time
spent would work for non-obvious scenarios, like end-user desktop or mobile
apps.

[1]: <http://clojure.org/funding> [2]:
[http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/07/07/producing-
nothing.h...](http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/07/07/producing-nothing.html)

------
abyssknight
I know Microsoft has a team that does OSS work on .NET MVC and related
projects. Not sure if they do that full time, but I'm sure if you ask Scott
Hanselman or Phil Haack they can tell you.

In a lot of cases companies will buy the talent behind an open source project
to get the support they need. Sounds funny, but when you consider a piece of
software mission critical to your business its a lot safer to be able to pay
the guy or gal and get their immediate attention. :)

I think Apple did that with the CUPS creator, and Rapid7 did something similar
with w3af. Sometimes its called "partnering" or "sponsorship" other times it
is an all out acquisition. It depends.

------
ogrisel
I am full-time R&D engineer at <http://nuxeo.com> working on integrating
semantic analysis technologies into our open-source document management
platform and applications.

All my code is released under LGPL or ASL2 on either the company mercurial
repo <http://hg.nuxeo.org> or on apache projects we contribute to (Apache
Chemistry and soon Apache Stanbol).

The company sells support subscriptions, consulting, training and custom dev.

------
estherschindler
I wrote an article last year about the "how to" of making a living writing
open source: [http://www.itworld.com/open-source/80180/building-your-
caree...](http://www.itworld.com/open-source/80180/building-your-career-open-
source) ...or, actually, a series of articles. Maybe it'll help. (Because it's
not just "who's doing it" under consideration, but "how.")

~~~
seltzered
thank you so much. I'm trying to explore the possibility of addressing an
industry-wide problem through starting an open-source foundation.

Do you know anyone who has gone through the effort of convincing the boss not
just to leverage open-source, but start such a thing from scratch?

------
trin_
donations. from inidividual users and from corporations. its not unusual for
corporations to donate money to oss software that play a big role in their
business/infrastructure.

also some companys make the step to employ these people full time and
sometimes even to work on the software full time.

------
rythie
There is a good breakdown of employers for the Linux kernel code here:
<http://lwn.net/Articles/373405/>

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angelixd
I was a software engineer for a company doing open-source backup software for
two years. Almost all of the code I worked on was released under the GPL
(there were a few proprietary components I worked on).

It's entirely possible to find a salaried position where you develop open
source software professionally. However, your employers will most likely not
consider that a factor when assigning work.

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mapleoin
It's very simple, just work for a big company that does open-source: RedHat,
Novell, Canonical immediately spring to mind.

~~~
riledhel
don't forget Mozilla or Automattic :P

~~~
photomatt
We (Automattic) love hiring open source contributors and creators, they always
go to the top of the queue.

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wccrawford
Aside from donations, some get hired directly by corporations to develop the
projects further. Obviously, there is some pressure to move the project in a
certain direction when that happens.

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rglullis
Does grant-funded research count? Until last year I was working on
<http://esphealth.org> full-time, and it's all GPL.

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retroafroman
I believe that the Banshee media player is maintained and developed largely by
Gabriel Burt and Aaron Bockover, who are paid by Novell.

I'm betting that the of OSS development that is done by people who are paid
for it, is seem as a marketing effort. Any large corporation have more than
enough money for a few developers in their marketing budget.

~~~
sathyabhat
speaking about Novell, Isn't Miguel De Icaza a Novell employee ?

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technomancy
Engine yard pays Charles Nutter and Tom Enebo work full-time on JRuby as well
as Evan Phoenix and Brian Ford on Rubinius.

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xiongchiamiov
My employer (a math textbook company) uses previously-developed GPL-licensed
software to do online homework. We host it and provide support, further
development, and preset problems and courses that correspond to our books. I
get paid for doing server maintenance and hacking on the code.

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nose
I used to work on an Apache project full-time at Yahoo!

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guynamedloren
37signals. Sorta.

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bmelton
SourceFire (<http://sourcefire.com>) makes Snort and ClamAV, both of which are
open source, but they also have content revenue models, commercial products
and a service branch.

