Alex Ellis here - the author of Inlets and OpenFaaS. If you want to work on Open Source as a full-time career, the best option is to find a company that is wor

Alex Ellis here - the author of Inlets and OpenFaaS. If you want to work on Open Source as a full-time career, the best option is to find a company that is working on or invested in an OSS project and join that team. Examples: VMware contribute heavily to Kubernetes. As do Azure, and a myriad of other companies from large to small. I tried this option, it has pros and cons, if you go for this one, let's hope you like politics and corporate jargon. The question is - what does "full time open source" mean to you? To me, it means work on independent projects. Unfortunately that alone is not financially sustainable in the long term. You may be able to drain down your savings for a few months, but then you're going to be left feeling a little down and out. Options for independent OSS work are a little rough, read this from 2019 if you're a project lead and think that somehow the community or users will pay your way just because they use the software in critical systems, spoiler - they won't - the reason they are using your software is because it's free: https://blog.alexellis.io/the-5-pressures-of-leadership/ https://blog.alexellis.io/the-5-pressures-of-leadership/ If you have your own projects that you want to work on, you'll need to find a revenue stream. This is what I wrote up for those considering going independent: "What you need to know before you go freelance" - https://levelup.gitconnected.com/what-you-need-to-know-before-you-go-freelance-259bd9d4b2d1 https://levelup.gitconnected.com/what-you-need-to-know-befor... Options which clearly do not work: sponsorship, donations, asking users to support you, offering commercial support as a single-person company Options that do work: Job at big-co (you won't work on your own projects, but theirs, or their interests). Working for yourself as an independent consultant, and taking a "pay cut" to contribute to OSS as and when you feel like it. You could also create a paid product and use this to find some "time off paid work", which is essentially what OSS is. That product could be based-upon the OSS you want to build, or not. I do have a GitHub Sponsors account, but I run it as a value-add subscription, not as a donation platform. https://github.com/sponsors/alexellis https://github.com/sponsors/alexellis - starting a consulting business from scratch is not easy, especially in global lock-down and a spending freeze. This, eventually may provide a buffer to pay the monthly accountancy and company costs. Longer term plan for my business is to capitalise on product and consulting practice. Open Source will be "in the car", but not in the driving seat. The question for you is - what do you think it means to "work on open source full-time", why do you want that and what are the alternatives?