I started working on open source firmware: first openbios, then coreboot. The one thing that made this a job opportunity (my career is coreboot-based for about

I started working on open source firmware: first openbios, then coreboot. The one thing that made this a job opportunity (my career is coreboot-based for about 12 years now) was that I built some rapport within the communities. These days I'm paid to work on Chrome OS firmware, which uses coreboot. Becoming the go-to person for some aspect of the project is easier for smaller projects rather than huge operations like Chromium for several reasons, among them: 1. No matter what you do, you won't out-run an army of full time developers that have multiple levels of management to coordinate their efforts (which is a force-multiplier to some degree). 2. Projects the size of Chromium tend to have lots of discussion internally within participating teams. There's no ill will about this, it's just how people work when they happen to share both project and office space. So yes, open source work can lead to fine careers, but you'll need some differentiator that makes people go "maybe I should ask anindha about this". If or when that happens in a "marketable" project (as far as careers go there was certainly luck involved in my story: openbios has little commercial use, and coreboot's commercial prospects looked grim for a while as well), at some point some team will want to have you work on their tasks full time: Much better than hoping that you aren't busy doing whatever else you need to pay the bills. There are probably other ways to get a career based on open source work, but that was mine.