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I've been working on side projects for about 7 years now. All my side projects are open source. I wouldn't advise going into open source to make money but it's

I've been working on side projects for about 7 years now. All my side projects are open source. I wouldn't advise going into open source to make money but it's a great way to build connections. Considering the failure rate of for-profit side-projects among people I know, I think that maybe open source isn't such a bad idea from a career point of view. My first open source project was a failure; I worked on it for 3 years for maybe 20 hours per week. At around the same time, a number of hot SV startups started building very similar products 'as a service' - I felt that I could not compete with that kind of VC money so I gave up (I felt that open source did not stand a chance in that industry against the 'as-a-service' model). It was my first project so I wasn't too disappointed; it was mostly a learning experience. It was good to know that I could at least come up with the right ideas but that I had to improve execution. Also, picking an area/industry where open source software can thrive is important. Open source is not easy; it still has to compete with big advertising dollars and VC money. I've been working on my second open source project for almost 4 years now. It's quite well known in its area (it got traction pretty soon after launch and kept growing steadily). Looking back, it does feel like I could have spent my time on more lucrative things; but the problem with money is that everyone wants it; so things get very competitive and marketing-oriented. So maybe from a career/networking point of view, my open source work wasn't a bad ROI after all... For a side hustle.

zitterbewegung 9y ago
Why don't you try marketing your opensource experience or software? It seems like you have a product that has traction.
- jondubois 9y ago
  I did get some consulting contracts from companies over the past year. Also, very recently, I accepted a sponsorship deal from a very interesting company which is using my project. I feel that it's just starting to settle into a niche which might have commercial potential but I don't want to rush anything. Commercial stuff is secondary for me.
  - k-mcgrady 9y ago
    I think what OP may have been hinting at (although I may be wrong) was a book/course/blog on what it's like working on a OS project and teaching other people how they can do the same while avoiding common mistakes.
    - zitterbewegung 9y ago
      No, I wasn't but those are good ideas!
kornish 9y ago
Out of interest, what was your first open source project and what's your current?
- jondubois 9y ago
  First one was a drag-and-drop Content Management System. https://sourceforge.net/projects/jumbo/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/jumbo/ I wanted to market it to web design agencies so that they could offer it to their clients and they would pay me a consulting fee to help them set up and build templates for them. Eventually the area got completely dominated by as-a-service offerings such as Weebly, Yola, Wix and others. I don't even know if web design agencies (which build static websites) still exist anymore so I think that giving up was a really good decision. If I had gone down that route, I probably would have ended up with a SaaS solution eventually, but I was just too slow. My current project is http://socketcluster.io/ http://socketcluster.io/
  - adventured 9y ago
    There might still be a place for what you were working on back then. As a favor to a friend, I recently set them up on Wix for a simple site they wanted to present for their new one-person business. It has been a long time since I've had such a horrendous experience with a product, and all I needed from Wix as an outcome was a one page site that my friend could then manipulate on their own. Nothing worked very well, it wasn't easy to use, few things worked as Wix claimed, there were a lot of limitations on customization below their limited framework (with custom code of most any kind you immediately start to run into problems with Wix). Somehow Wix is a growing, soon-to-be $400 million sales company worth $3.3 billion. There's a huge market for destroying these guys with a better product. Google to their AltaVista.
    - jondubois 9y ago
      Well it was years ago, so it's old technology now. Also it doesn't matter how bad a product is; if they have a big enough advertising budget, they're impossible to compete with - Nobody will even hear that your product exists and even if they do, they won't trust it.

zitterbewegung 9y ago

Why don't you try marketing your opensource experience or software? It seems like you have a product that has traction.

jondubois 9y ago
I did get some consulting contracts from companies over the past year. Also, very recently, I accepted a sponsorship deal from a very interesting company which is using my project. I feel that it's just starting to settle into a niche which might have commercial potential but I don't want to rush anything. Commercial stuff is secondary for me.
- k-mcgrady 9y ago
  I think what OP may have been hinting at (although I may be wrong) was a book/course/blog on what it's like working on a OS project and teaching other people how they can do the same while avoiding common mistakes.
  - zitterbewegung 9y ago
    No, I wasn't but those are good ideas!

kornish 9y ago

Out of interest, what was your first open source project and what's your current?

jondubois 9y ago
First one was a drag-and-drop Content Management System. https://sourceforge.net/projects/jumbo/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/jumbo/ I wanted to market it to web design agencies so that they could offer it to their clients and they would pay me a consulting fee to help them set up and build templates for them. Eventually the area got completely dominated by as-a-service offerings such as Weebly, Yola, Wix and others. I don't even know if web design agencies (which build static websites) still exist anymore so I think that giving up was a really good decision. If I had gone down that route, I probably would have ended up with a SaaS solution eventually, but I was just too slow. My current project is http://socketcluster.io/ http://socketcluster.io/
- adventured 9y ago
  There might still be a place for what you were working on back then. As a favor to a friend, I recently set them up on Wix for a simple site they wanted to present for their new one-person business. It has been a long time since I've had such a horrendous experience with a product, and all I needed from Wix as an outcome was a one page site that my friend could then manipulate on their own. Nothing worked very well, it wasn't easy to use, few things worked as Wix claimed, there were a lot of limitations on customization below their limited framework (with custom code of most any kind you immediately start to run into problems with Wix). Somehow Wix is a growing, soon-to-be $400 million sales company worth $3.3 billion. There's a huge market for destroying these guys with a better product. Google to their AltaVista.
  - jondubois 9y ago
    Well it was years ago, so it's old technology now. Also it doesn't matter how bad a product is; if they have a big enough advertising budget, they're impossible to compete with - Nobody will even hear that your product exists and even if they do, they won't trust it.