5 ms·

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

33 points by kia 16y ago

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

trin_ 16y ago
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.
wccrawford 16y ago
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.
abyssknight 16y ago
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.
gregschlom 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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?
rythie 16y ago
There is a good breakdown of employers for the Linux kernel code here: http://lwn.net/Articles/373405/ http://lwn.net/Articles/373405/
rglullis 16y ago
Does grant-funded research count? Until last year I was working on http://esphealth.org http://esphealth.org full-time, and it's all GPL.
iampims 16y ago
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.
ogrisel 16y ago
I am full-time R&D engineer at http://nuxeo.com 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 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.
mapleoin 16y ago
It's very simple, just work for a big company that does open-source: RedHat, Novell, Canonical immediately spring to mind.
- riledhel 16y ago
  don't forget Mozilla or Automattic :P
  - xiongchiamiov 16y ago
    Or Google?
  - photomatt 16y ago
    We (Automattic) love hiring open source contributors and creators, they always go to the top of the queue.
bmelton 16y ago
SourceFire (http://sourcefire.com 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.
sandGorgon 16y ago
Rich Hickey of Clojure (http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/cc77df25e98ce46b?pli=1 http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/...) Matt Mackall of Mercurial, before it was acquired (http://selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial/2010-April/031543.html http://selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial/2010-April/031543.htm...)
- tsmall 16y ago
  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 http://clojure.org/funding [2]: http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/07/07/producing-nothing.html http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/07/07/producing-nothing.h...
technomancy 16y ago
Engine yard pays Charles Nutter and Tom Enebo work full-time on JRuby as well as Evan Phoenix and Brian Ford on Rubinius.
angelixd 16y ago
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.
retroafroman 16y ago
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 16y ago
  speaking about Novell, Isn't Miguel De Icaza a Novell employee ?
estherschindler 16y ago
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-career-open-source http://www.itworld.com/open-source/80180/building-your-caree... ...or, actually, a series of articles. Maybe it'll help. (Because it's not just "who's doing it" under consideration, but "how.")
- seltzered 16y ago
  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?
xiongchiamiov 16y ago
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.
nose 16y ago
I used to work on an Apache project full-time at Yahoo!
guynamedloren 16y ago
37signals. Sorta.

33 points by kia 16y ago

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

trin_ 16y ago

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.

wccrawford 16y ago

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.

abyssknight 16y ago

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.

gregschlom 16y ago

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 16y ago
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?

rythie 16y ago

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

rglullis 16y ago

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

iampims 16y ago

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.

ogrisel 16y ago

I am full-time R&D engineer at http://nuxeo.com 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 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.

mapleoin 16y ago

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

riledhel 16y ago
don't forget Mozilla or Automattic :P
- xiongchiamiov 16y ago
  Or Google?
- photomatt 16y ago
  We (Automattic) love hiring open source contributors and creators, they always go to the top of the queue.

bmelton 16y ago

SourceFire (http://sourcefire.com 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.

sandGorgon 16y ago

Rich Hickey of Clojure (http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/cc77df25e98ce46b?pli=1 http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/...) Matt Mackall of Mercurial, before it was acquired (http://selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial/2010-April/031543.html http://selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial/2010-April/031543.htm...)

tsmall 16y ago
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 http://clojure.org/funding [2]: http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/07/07/producing-nothing.html http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/07/07/producing-nothing.h...

technomancy 16y ago

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

angelixd 16y ago

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.

retroafroman 16y ago

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 16y ago
speaking about Novell, Isn't Miguel De Icaza a Novell employee ?

estherschindler 16y ago

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-career-open-source http://www.itworld.com/open-source/80180/building-your-caree... ...or, actually, a series of articles. Maybe it'll help. (Because it's not just "who's doing it" under consideration, but "how.")

seltzered 16y ago
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?

xiongchiamiov 16y ago

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.

nose 16y ago

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

guynamedloren 16y ago

37signals. Sorta.