4 ms·
> What are some tips to get into open source and turn it into fulltime career I feel like you could replace "open source" with "programming" and it would be ba
by gwd 6y ago
> What are some tips to get into open source and turn it into fulltime career
I feel like you could replace "open source" with "programming" and it would be basically the same question.
There are two sides to working a successful business:
1) Having something of value people want
2) Figuring out how to 'capture' that value in a sustainable way
The vast majority of people either aren't very good at, or don't really enjoy, #2, and so they outsource the "how to make money off this" to a company (i.e., they work for a company). You write the software the company asks you to, and the company figures out how to make money from it.
The same thing goes for open source: Probably the dead easiest way to make money from open source is to apply for a job at RedHat. Or SUSE, or Ubuntu. Or one of the teams at Twitter or Facebook or Google that do open source. You get to work on open-source software, and the company gets to figure out how to capture value from the activity.
Alternately, you could work for yourself, but then you have to figure out how to capture that value yourself. There are lots of creative ways to do that, but you have to figure out your own market. And in the end, if you're successful, you'll probably have more demand than you can satisfy all by yourself, so you'll need to hire other people, in which case other developers will be outsourcing the "figure out how to capture value" thing to you.
Or, it can just be your hobby, and you can treat it as such: do it insofar as it's fun for you, and don't worry about anything else.
Me myself, I'm a developer paid full-time to work on open source software.
I also have a handful of hobby projects I've worked on in my spare time, which I've put up on github with an open license. Those are things I would be doing for my own purpose anyway; might as well let someone else use them if they want. But I'm never expecting them to become a big thing, and if they did I certainly wouldn't spend much time working on them unless I decided to try to take a jump and figure out how to make it pay.