Yep, I get paid to work on QEMU. I would suggest that your chances of getting paid to work on something and what kind of work that turns out to be depend quite

Yep, I get paid to work on QEMU. I would suggest that your chances of getting paid to work on something and what kind of work that turns out to be depend quite a bit on the project. You can have a look at the git commit history or the mailing lists: if the project really mostly worked on by a single company (as I suspect may be the case with Mozilla and Chromium) then the only paid employment prospects are likely to be with that company. A niche project might not have any opportunities for paid work on it at all. At the other extreme, if you look at the Linux kernel it has a huge range of corporate contributions of various kinds (as well as a lot of work that's purely downstream) and you have better chances of finding one that does the kind of work you might want to do. 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...