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

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)