Your clients will need to grok the ideas behind open source. Try asking potential clients what they believe the open source community will get out of it if you

Your clients will need to grok the ideas behind open source. Try asking potential clients what they believe the open source community will get out of it if you take on the job. Their answer will probably tell you if they understand what they're getting into. Take a good look at the ecosystem of your open source project. Does it have a large user community? Are there companies involved in funding some of its developers? Will the project still be alive in a couple of years? If you contribute to widely used open source projects you should be able to find paid jobs doing consulting (troubleshooting bugs and other problems, helping companies who are transitioning to using the software), training users who rely on your project to do their job (this might involve a good amount of travelling), and coding (but to a lesser degree). Coding activities are often taken for granted even by commercial users since "it's free software" as in "saving costs". I am rarely being paid for coding directly, and mostly work on code during off peak periods where not much consulting/support/training is going on. Unless you start a project of your own, there's a non-trivial amount of time to invest before you become enough of an expert in a project to be taken seriously by potential clients. I was lucky enough to be on paid student job to do just that for several years and now I'm freelancing too (URL to my offering can be found on my HN user page). Showing a strong and productive presence in user support forums will also help raising your profile, but again is a lot of time invested up front. If you end up persuing paid open source work in earnest I'd be interested to hear how you're getting on. Feel free to contact me any time. Good luck!