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This is a decent article that could stand on its own. It is also a PR piece by TimescaleDB which has all interest in convincing people/investors that an open-s

This is a decent article that could stand on its own. It is also a PR piece by TimescaleDB which has all interest in convincing people/investors that an open-source company is a good deal: > (Disclaimer: Our company TimescaleDB is an open-source time-series database startup and shares investors with several of these companies, including Elastic, MongoDB, Hortonworks, Confluent, and Databricks.) There were more paragraphs, but I only picked 2 to comment: > If you are an individual, your project (or your contributions to someone else’s open-source project) will get you visibility and help your long-term career. If you want, you’ll travel the world, deliver talks on your work, and meet like-minded people along the way. I doubt this is still the case. With GitHub/Universities promoting open source contributions all over the place, it offers much less leverage. Maybe a very popular project helps the career but otherwise I think it's just a work out of passion. Might even hinder your career. >Some think that open-source foundations should fund open-source projects directly through stipends or fellowships. But these foundations are not money-making machines: e.g., the Apache Foundation barely made $500,000 in 2011. Perhaps these foundations can fund individual developers, but are extremely unlikely to be able to support open-source projects at scale. True. But some foundations do fund specific areas in need, eg. FreeBSD Foundation. Apache is a bad example as they don't fund anything. What do they need $500,000 for is unclear to me since infrastructure for projects can't cost so much (and nowadays it's offloaded to GitHub, etc).

akulkarni 7y ago
This comment is really funny. The way we (TimescaleDB) try to convince people (and investors) is with our product, not blog posts. But we write blog posts to transparently share our learnings with the rest of the world. That's just the open-source way. :-) Btw for others who are reading - contributing to open-source is still very much a way to build your career, travel the world, etc. I personally know people who are living their best lives because of this. It doesn't happen for everyone, but if you are early in your career then I very much recommend it.
- fierarul 7y ago
  It's not funny if you think that http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html is more or less mandatory reading on HN. I would like to see some data point towards the success related to open source involvement. I'm sure outliers exist just as there are people doing really well with their solo AppStore app or with their niche website. And I'm saying this as somebody involved in open source: better to see it as a hobby done out of passion. Any other benefits are random/luck and except if you get to feel some passion for a highly sought out niche (hello Machine Learning) you shouldn't expect anything out of it. Entering into it with the expectation of building your career, traveling the world, etc is going to lead to disappointment.

akulkarni 7y ago

This comment is really funny. The way we (TimescaleDB) try to convince people (and investors) is with our product, not blog posts. But we write blog posts to transparently share our learnings with the rest of the world. That's just the open-source way. :-) Btw for others who are reading - contributing to open-source is still very much a way to build your career, travel the world, etc. I personally know people who are living their best lives because of this. It doesn't happen for everyone, but if you are early in your career then I very much recommend it.

fierarul 7y ago
It's not funny if you think that http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html is more or less mandatory reading on HN. I would like to see some data point towards the success related to open source involvement. I'm sure outliers exist just as there are people doing really well with their solo AppStore app or with their niche website. And I'm saying this as somebody involved in open source: better to see it as a hobby done out of passion. Any other benefits are random/luck and except if you get to feel some passion for a highly sought out niche (hello Machine Learning) you shouldn't expect anything out of it. Entering into it with the expectation of building your career, traveling the world, etc is going to lead to disappointment.