One possible path here is to build something so close to a company that you're likely to end up getting hired to maintain it. One notable example is the author

One possible path here is to build something so close to a company that you're likely to end up getting hired to maintain it. One notable example is the author of the "boto" aws SDK (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/big-news-regarding-python-boto-and-aws/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/big-news-regarding-python-b...), who was hired by amazon to keep working on it. It still took 6 years for him to get hired. The majority of projects like this end up not resulting in hires to work on that project (though they can result in hires pretty easily to do other work at the company). A second path is to join a faang company that does OSS work, specifically on a team that does so. You could join facebook on the react team, google on the chromium/android/go team, etc etc. In all of those teams, you'll probably be a small cog in the machine for a while, but if you persevere, it's possible to create an adjacent project that you own. It's much easier to split out into your own company-paid-for OSS work from a team that already does OSS work. This option is unquestionably the easiest path. It's still not easy. A third path is to build something that is valuable enough to be acquired, but coincidentally is open source, and then make it remaining open source a condition of being acquired. Zulip managed this route when dropbox acquired them, and there's a few other examples, but this is a very hard route. Notice that none of these examples are great for most open source projects. Those options mostly require you to change the OSS projects you work on from what you want to something a faang wants you to work on. To get paid a faang salary working on your own project of your own invention is practically impossible without incredible luck, or being a principal engineer (i.e. guido getting paid by google to work on python, rob pike to create go, other examples certainly exist). My recommendation? If you want a faang salary to do oss work, but are okay compromising on the project, pick the faang company with a project closest to what you want to do and get hired for that oss project specifically. If you'd rather work on your oss project than have a faang salary to work on someone else's project, then that's great! You have the passion to work on your foss thing, and that's a good sign. Keep working on it, and understand that your chance of making any money is almost nil.