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I think there are a few answers to this. 1) There are a lot of worthy projects to contribute to. Should you work on Firefox? Linux? LibreOffice? OpenSSL? I thi

I think there are a few answers to this. 1) There are a lot of worthy projects to contribute to. Should you work on Firefox? Linux? LibreOffice? OpenSSL? I think it's as reasonable to ask "where should I volunteer?" as it is to ask, "to which charity should I donate money?" 2) Fame/clout. There are a number of Internet-famous developers who work in open source. When they blog, people listen to what they have to say. When they file a bug on an open-source project, people fix it. When they start a project, people download it, try it, and contribute patches. This is totally unlike the experience for ordinary developers. When most people blog, nobody reads it. When most people file a bug, or even file a PR, it just gets ignored. When most people start a project on github, nobody notices it. Clearly there is a path, however narrow, from here to there. How, people ask, can I walk that path? 3) When people really are talking about an "open source career," they often are asking, "how can I get paid to work on open source?" That does require selecting good projects that have the potential to pay off. 4) In some cases, people are asking, "what are high-impact open-source projects where it's easy for newbies to get started?" Even once you've chosen a project, not all projects make it easy to submit your first patch.

kvz 9y ago
> "how can I get paid to work on open source?" That does require selecting good projects that have the potential to pay off. Or selecting a company. E.g. at our company (transloadit) >80% of work is on open source
jondubois 9y ago
I have to agree that it does help a lot with career if your open source project succeeds. That said, it's very hard to start a successful project that people might actually remember you for. Note that working on open source will cost you money personally (in terms of missed opportunities). If you spend 20 hours per week on your project for over 4 years, that's over 4000 hours... If you assume that your time is worth just $50 USD per hour, then you're missing out on at least $200k of income over those 4 years. You could have bought a small house/apartment for that money... Most open source developers will feel the pinch after a few years have passed. You will probably be skilled in a specific area but also exhausted and poor (a difficult combination). So starting an open source project is like making a huge, very risky investment in yourself and in the hypothetical community which might form around your project. Your future career path will depend mostly on your community's success and how much of an impact your project has on them.
_sdegutis 9y ago
5) I have some cool open source projects (Hydra / Mjolnir) that I would love to work on more but don’t have enough time for, especially considering my wife and I have 5 kids. Getting paid for working on it would allow me to add requested features or fix bugs.

kvz 9y ago

> "how can I get paid to work on open source?" That does require selecting good projects that have the potential to pay off. Or selecting a company. E.g. at our company (transloadit) >80% of work is on open source

jondubois 9y ago

I have to agree that it does help a lot with career if your open source project succeeds. That said, it's very hard to start a successful project that people might actually remember you for. Note that working on open source will cost you money personally (in terms of missed opportunities). If you spend 20 hours per week on your project for over 4 years, that's over 4000 hours... If you assume that your time is worth just $50 USD per hour, then you're missing out on at least $200k of income over those 4 years. You could have bought a small house/apartment for that money... Most open source developers will feel the pinch after a few years have passed. You will probably be skilled in a specific area but also exhausted and poor (a difficult combination). So starting an open source project is like making a huge, very risky investment in yourself and in the hypothetical community which might form around your project. Your future career path will depend mostly on your community's success and how much of an impact your project has on them.

_sdegutis 9y ago

5) I have some cool open source projects (Hydra / Mjolnir) that I would love to work on more but don’t have enough time for, especially considering my wife and I have 5 kids. Getting paid for working on it would allow me to add requested features or fix bugs.