[HN Gopher] Ask HN: How do you make a living contributing to and...
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Ask HN: How do you make a living contributing to and/or creating
OSS projects?
How would one go about being a 'rogue' OSS contributor so to speak?
Live off of donations, bounties, hackathons, ect?
Author : Brysonbw
Score : 49 points
Date : 2025-04-02 18:24 UTC (4 hours ago)
| arjonagelhout wrote:
| There might also be some local government grants for innovation
| and culture that can cover a bit of costs.
| ai-christianson wrote:
| Many OSS contributors are on the payroll of a company --or is
| that outside the scope of what you're looking for?
| fouronnes3 wrote:
| I'm really interested in this discussion. I started an open-
| source project [1], and I've been working on it for the past 6
| months full-time on my own time and money (savings + benefits).
| First I was part of a batch at the Recurse Center [2], now I'm
| alone at home. I'd love to keep working on it because I have a
| big roadmap and ideas, but I'm not sure if I will be able to.
| It's heartbreaking to have to stop at version 0.0.1 when I know
| that 1.0 could be _so good_. If I just had the time...
|
| [1] https://victorpoughon.github.io/torchlensmaker/
|
| [2] https://www.recurse.com/
| robshep wrote:
| Your project looks great. Have you looked at the "services"
| route?
|
| Instead of companies or individuals paying you to build your
| software, that they may find useful, (and some companies may
| not feel comformatble funding a bit of software that their
| competitors could otherwise take for free), you instead provide
| - through a services company - integration support,
| customisation, hosted versions, or other tertiary elements of
| value (such as premium documentation) that keep you focused on
| your project (albeit via some diversification)
|
| If the software is free (as in beer) then what else might
| potential users need, that you can monitise.
|
| E.g. Documentation, installation scripts, advanced models don't
| "have" to be free alongside the code. Just a thought.
| fouronnes3 wrote:
| Thanks. Yeah that would be great I'm sure. The issue I have
| is also getting everything started. I've got a bit of a
| chicken and egg problem where I need users to fund the
| development, but I need to develop more features to get
| users.
| xandrius wrote:
| Convince your company to contribute back to the libraries they
| use?
|
| Otherwise donations and bounties are a good way.
|
| Hackathons are a poor way to do that, as it's often on the whims
| of random egocentric judges pushing their own agendas and not
| interested in the tech itself.
| Zaskoda wrote:
| Since you mentioned hackathons - A few years ago I was working on
| a game for the Ethereum Virtual Machine and I ended up going to
| EthDenver. While there, I discovered a rich and vibrant hackathon
| scene with a lot of monetary prizes. The hackathons were often
| for various blockchain platforms and, thus, those prizes were
| generally awarded in whatever cryptocurrency was native to that
| platform. From their point of view, it was a smart move. They
| create a network, retain a huge block of pre-minted currency,
| establish a market price, and then give out that currency as
| hackathon awards. As a competitor, you can cash you winnings in
| right away, so it works well enough. A friend and I cleared
| almost $30k one year in various contests. Unfortunately, winning
| a hackathon was often more about creating something that would
| make for good marketing buzz rather than creating something truly
| novel or even useful. And, frankly, the actual quality of your
| execution rarely mattered. We lost one contest where we had a
| fully working prototype deployed and live but lost to teams with
| ideas that sounded fun but were technically unfeasible. Still, if
| you're willing to play the game, it seems there's money to be
| made. My friend and I have since moved on and have not continued
| to participate - but it sure made for fun memories.
| peteforde wrote:
| The fact that the infrastructure of the world is build on the
| backs of people who literally cannot make a living wage is a
| major failure of late-stage capitalism.
| peterldowns wrote:
| What makes you think capitalism is in "late-stage"? And what
| makes you think that free labor, voluntarily given, has
| anything to do with capitalism? And if it does, how could the
| astounding amount of value provided by the open source
| community be considered a failure?
|
| http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
| peteforde wrote:
| Late-stage capitalism is a term that is rapidly approaching
| its 100th birthday. It colloquially describes a phase of
| capitalism marked by the dominance of multinational
| corporations, financial speculation, and mass consumerism. Do
| you really take issue with this characterization?
|
| I make no argument against free labor, voluntarily given in
| service of a collective good.
|
| I do take issue with the fact that creating OSS is not a
| viable way to cover basic living expenses unless you are on
| some corporation's payroll.
| tester756 wrote:
| A lot of people who e.g contribute to Linux are working in big
| tech
| peterldowns wrote:
| I don't, and I don't think you should expect to, either. But I'd
| recommend doing open source work anyway -- it's a fantastic way
| to stand out when applying for jobs, to meet other programmers
| who may be hiring, and to contribute back to the world!
| sosodev wrote:
| I suspect the best way to forge an independent path in 2025 is to
| combine your work with social media. It seems like people with a
| dedicated audience can do whatever they please and live
| comfortably.
| badlibrarian wrote:
| Careful, it's hard to tell where they are on the fake it 'til
| you make it curve.
| poisonborz wrote:
| Imagine doing something out of passion and goodwill.
| bawolff wrote:
| Passion and goodwill doesn't pay the rent.
| lanfeust6 wrote:
| If you work an honest 8h, there isn't much bandwidth left.
| Also, money.
| blatantly wrote:
| According to linkedin and Google high ups, you need to do an
| honest 60-80h a week as an employee so you can gain the
| highly lucrative, liquid and bullish asset of your boss maybe
| remembering you worked 60-80h a week.
| palata wrote:
| Yeah, and how good it feels when random people come complaining
| about you not adding a feature they want for free or not being
| responsive enough! /s
| blatantly wrote:
| Imagine affording an avacado
| bawolff wrote:
| Either work for a company who has an interest in the software, or
| do consulting where you help customers use/adapt the software in
| their specific context. Those are basically the options that
| actually work.
|
| Unless you are famous, its unlikely you will get enough donations
| to be meaningful.
| mvieira38 wrote:
| Many projects go the VC route and pitch a business model built on
| the back of the open source stuff. Look at Astral, for example,
| where ruff and uv are 100% open source but they are VC backed.
| Admittedly not the dream scenario having to deal with finance
| people while working FOSS
| blatantly wrote:
| A good chunkn of YC seems to be this model.
| matvp wrote:
| I contribute to OSS very often, mostly sponsored by the company I
| work for (we're in video streaming, and we're too small to build
| everything from scratch). Outside of company hours, I work on my
| personal streaming project [1], and I've had a couple of people
| find the "Buy me a coffee" button and GitHub sponsors page. While
| it is not a sustainable amount of sponsorship, the joy of seeing
| people support with a few bucks feels incredible. It's a passion
| project after all.
|
| I used to maintain a private fork of an OSS project as I assumed
| my company wouldn't want specific features out there (especially
| since they gave a competitive advantage). I eventually met up
| with the maintainers of that project with a situation I couldn't
| figure out and they were so eager to help. After, I went to legal
| and told them it didn't feel fair to have OSS maintainers help
| out but keep it private, and to my surprise, they agreed. All I
| had to do was ask, and not assume.
|
| [1] https://superstreamer.xyz/
| plankalkyl wrote:
| I am not an OSS contributor, so I have no personal experience
| whatsoever in this context.
|
| But I saw this talk by Evan Czaplicki (author of Elm) a while
| ago.[1]
|
| The talk is primarily about the economics of open-source
| programming languages, but I think that a lot of the issues
| discussed overlap with other areas of OSS.
|
| From the description of the youtube video:
|
| > In the mythology of open source, programming languages are
| created by people who seemingly have no direct economic function.
| They are just really good at compilers (somehow) and have a house
| to live in (somehow) and have a lifetime to devote to creating a
| useful programming language (somehow!)
|
| > We will examine specific organizations that create programming
| languages. Where do the salaries for compiler engineers come
| from? How does Go end up with 5 engineers and Dart end up with
| 30? Who signs off on these expenses and why? Does this put any
| boundaries on language design or development practices? And how
| do the economics work for people outside of the major tech
| corporations?
|
| > My goal is to give the talk I needed to hear 10 years ago when
| I was just starting on Elm. By clearly delineating the many
| variations of corporate funding and independent funding, I hope
| users will come away with a better foundation for evaluating and
| comparing programming languages.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ3w_jec1v8
| r_singh wrote:
| I sponsor this project called mkdocs material by squidfunk. I
| remember reading that the author gets $18k per month in
| sponsorships and thought that was a great example for an open
| source project based income.
| irf1 wrote:
| Building https://Algora.io for this :) open sourcing the platform
| this week (built in Elixir).
|
| our goal is to simplify OSS bounties, funding and contract work.
|
| would love your input. it's an open source Upwork for developers.
| simne wrote:
| I live in Ukraine and Stripe is not working here. How I could
| got payment? Thank you!
| hugs wrote:
| Hard to live off donations. Probably won't be very stable.
|
| These are the methods I've tried (and known to work, at least for
| me): - Work at a consulting company - Work
| in a big tech company - Start your own SaaS company
| - Start your own robotics company and sell hardware
| bravetraveler wrote:
| In my time off, every business has made it annoyingly difficult
| to do this with any official capacity. I want to blame the
| fiefdom crafting...
|
| The 'subtext' here is that I haven't found it particularly
| ~~profitable~~ sustainable by itself
| SlackingOff123 wrote:
| I haven't thought about trying to earn from OSS myself, but I'm
| curious to see how Jimmy Bogard - who recently announced this
| intention - is going to handle it.
|
| - https://www.jimmybogard.com/automapper-and-mediatr-going-com...
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43558316
| kjok wrote:
| I believe that FOSS maintainers can gain financial independence
| and sustain their projects by "selling" hardened FOSS projects
| (think supply-chain security assurance) to consumers. I'm working
| on enabling this. DM me if interested.
| ATechGuy wrote:
| Sounds promising. How do you propose we create "hardened"
| projects?
| internet_points wrote:
| None of the above. A company wanted to use the thing and asked me
| for help and I kept fixing things quickly and easily which they
| struggled with and I guess they figured it was easier/cheaper to
| just pay me to work on it.
|
| So basically make things that are useful but hard to extend for
| anyone but you =P
| diffxx wrote:
| As a good friend who is the maintainer of a widely used oss tool
| likes to quip: the two hardest problems in computer science are
| naming things and making money in open source.
| zabzonk wrote:
| I dunno about "rogue", but write something useful (and well
| documented) that is easy to install and pay for (like PayPal, for
| example). You might be pleasantly surprised on what you get,
| enough to pay for some nice toys, but making a solid living is
| not likely, in my experience
| jedberg wrote:
| Step 1: Get a regular corporate job that allows you to work OSS
| some of the time
|
| Step 2: Work on OSS while doing your day job.
|
| If you're lucky you'll find a company that actually uses said
| OSS!
| nickjj wrote:
| I am guessing it's a hard thing to do unless you slam dunk
| something that hits absolute critical mass.
|
| I have a bunch of repos with 500-1000+ stars. I've gotten folks
| who emailed me entire stories on how a project I created helped
| them get over being blocked on something, or how it kick started
| them into getting more involved with programming. I've on many
| occasions had folks email me asking me why I put some of the
| things I do up for free on GitHub.
|
| All in all I've made around $17 in almost 10 years through
| donations (GitHub sponsorships).
|
| But I don't do it for the money, although I'll admit it would be
| nice to receive income for doing something you'd happily do for
| free anyways. I create almost all of my projects based on a
| personal need and the idea of openly sharing what I can is built
| into how I operate given how much I've learned from others, I
| feel very strongly about returning the favor when I can with no
| strings attached.
| benhoyt wrote:
| I do it by working for Canonical. The vast majority of our
| projects are open source. Yes, Canonical's application process is
| very long and thorough, but it's a good company to work for.
| Those aren't "my" projects, of course; I'm still very much
| working for an employer, but it's nice that our development
| effort is in the open and freely available. I also maintain a few
| of my own open source projects, for which (via GitHub Sponsors) I
| get about enough for one coffee date with my wife.
| freedomben wrote:
| As has already been said, by far the best way is to work for a
| company whose product is open source. I would find one that is
| fully committed to open source though, not just partially. By
| that I mean, a mainstream, money-making product of theirs is
| licensed appropriately (AGPL, MIT, etc). Going with a company
| that open sources a few libraries here and there is not a good
| strategy.
|
| That said, I have friends that have been able to spin open source
| roots into money, in one case really good money. Their paths
| were:
|
| 1. Find need not being addressed
|
| 2. Write open source solution for said need
|
| 3. Promote open source solution to drive adoption (yes, marketing
| is important in open source!)
|
| 4. Create training courses/material on solution
|
| 5. Sell training primarily to corporations and sometimes
| individuals for $
|
| The other path has the same first 3 steps, but instead of
| training:
|
| 4. Establish a "support" department
|
| 5. Sell support to corporations
|
| There's also the "open core" approach where you put enterprise
| features behind a pay-gate but give the basic product out as
| standard OSS. The biggest challenge here is that your business
| strategy will ultimately be in conflict with your community
| member's interests, which inevitably results in sacrificing one
| for the other, usually sacrificing community needs for the
| business. For example, consider you have SSO gated behind
| payment, and someone sends you a PR that adds SSO to your open
| core version. I would personally avoid this model unless you
| enjoy inner philosophical conflict with guaranteed losers and
| having to exert tight control on other people.
|
| The support path requires your product to be a lot more mature
| than most people usually think as most corps will expect things
| like SSO, audit logs, and other enterprisey features. You can
| usually find customers who won't insist on that, but any of the
| medium to large fish will.
|
| The donation model _can_ be sustainable and even pretty good if
| you find the right niche, though expect to put in a lot of time
| /effort early on before you get many donations.
|
| Lastly you could try the free-as-in-speech but not free-as-in-
| beer approach where your software is GPL but not free. Davis
| Remmel has used this for rcu[1] for example (which if you have a
| Remarkable Tablet you should absolutely purchase rcu!).
| Personally I love this model and am highly inclined to purchase
| when prices are reasonable, but it's not for everyone.
|
| Regardless, thank you for being interested in contributing to
| OSS! I think most people are largely unaware of the importance
| and significance of open source in our current world. It is one
| of the greatest gifts you can give, and enables people to do
| things they otherwise wouldn't be able to do. Essentially
| everything we have nowadays is powered at least in part by open
| source.
|
| [1]: https://www.davisr.me/projects/rcu/
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Basically, you contributing / creating OSS has to be tangential
| to what you charge money for. IE, your code is critical to your
| service or business, but not what you're selling.
|
| For example: My employer might open-source a C# adapter for an
| open-source C library. We won't make money off of the code, but
| it's a way to promote ourselves within people in our industry.
|
| I once met a guy who consulted on making realtime web
| applications in 2010. (Before websockets.) His library and
| protocol were open-source; but the service was making changes to
| real commercial web applications.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| You dont.
|
| Working: You make a living getting a job where people pay you to
| do something.
|
| Volunteering Donating your time to do something that others may
| find interesting or appreciate. Yoo do it because you can and or
| you want to and or feel it as a duty or calling.
|
| If you are serving meals to the homeless, it is a really bad way
| to get paid.
|
| These days the common approach seems to put out some decent
| project. if you get traction and people get involved and like it,
| you create a pro version that is not open source, then you chance
| the open source license of the "core / basic" version and then
| profit.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| OSS is a side hustle for most people that work it. It might turn
| into a full time paid gig for some but that's usually based on
| merit or just being in the right place at the right time. Which
| of course is nice but not something you can plan on having.
| Additionally a lot of OSS software is created by people that are
| doing this as part of their job at some company that happens to
| have some interest in a project or creates new projects.
|
| Either work for one of those. Or just contribute without any
| expectations about money. That's not for everyone but it kind of
| is how a lot of OSS gets created. And mostly hiring for such
| projects is done on merit based on being an active contributor.
| If you have a community of contributors, that's a great pool to
| hire from. You already know the people and their capabilities.
|
| I have a few OSS projects on Github. Most of those are just
| things I'm interested in doing anyway. I don't mind giving that
| away. I use a lot of OSS as well in my non OSS development so I
| see this as just contributing back and being a good OSS citizen.
| My own little way of providing back.
|
| And it's a useful way to make new freelance projects or jobs a
| bit less Ground Hog day. If you keep on writing the same code
| over and over again; just put it out there with some OSS license
| and next time reuse what you've already written. I've done that
| between a few startups now (where I was CTO so I could just do
| that at my discretion). Nice to not have to start from zero.
|
| And there are secondary effects if you are active as a consultant
| or freelancer in the sense that having some projects that people
| actually use gives you a bit more credibility as a developer, as
| an expert, as somebody that knows what they are talking about.
| Minimum it's just a nice portfolio of stuff you can do. Maximum
| it actually helps generate a bit of business and inbound for your
| services. People don't pay for OSS software. But they do pay for
| support, consulting, etc. And you are the world's leading expert
| on your OSS software.
|
| I dabble on the side (next to my main job as a CTO) doing
| occasional consulting on Elasticsearch and related technologies.
| I maintain a Kotlin client for Elasticsearch/Opensearch which is
| getting some usage and contributions. Mostly that's just
| something I use myself; so I don't mind spending some time on it.
|
| Most of my customers are not necessarily into Kotlin; so they
| wouldn't be using my software necessarily. But it helps them
| understand that I know what I'm doing and talking about. And it
| gets me a bit of exposure. OSS is not a bad sales tactic to just
| put yourself out there.
| nextn wrote:
| Why don't we all decide to start paying for software?
|
| We pay for software indirectly when buying an iPhone or Mac.
| Yoric wrote:
| I managed to convince my org that releasing projects as open-
| source was the best way to go (we're a hardware company, so this
| makes lots of sense). So now, my job is to create open-source
| projects from internal research projects.
| thdxr wrote:
| build something popular then build a second thing that's as
| popular that's paid
|
| it's pretty hard but that's what we did
| koreth1 wrote:
| This is maybe not in the spirit of OP's question, but I do it by
| having successfully made the case early in my company's lifetime
| that we should open-source most of our code.
|
| Nearly every piece of code I write at work is part of one of
| those public, Apache-licensed code bases. Which means I spend
| most of my time working on OSS.
|
| Are these projects the kind of thing anyone else will ever use?
| Probably not, so long as the company stays in business. The
| business case my team made was focused on transparency and long-
| term viability: our customers can see exactly what we're doing
| with their data and how our systems work, and if we go under,
| they have a realistic way to continue using our software. This
| hasn't ended up being a _huge_ selling point, but customers have
| definitely mentioned it as one of the things they liked about us.
| fuzztester wrote:
| Juust putting this out there:
|
| 1. Some people made good money from shareware in the early home
| computer days.
|
| One example:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Knopf
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-File
|
| Knopf originally wrote the software for his own use to manage a
| church mailing list, on an Apple II. Later, he ported it to CP/M,
| and then to MS-DOS. Other people heard about it, and started
| requesting copies. Eventually, the cost of sending out update
| disks inspired Knopf to include a note requesting a small cash
| donation to offset the expenses. The response was overwhelming,
| and when his income from PC-File exceeded "ten times" what he was
| making from his job at IBM, he decided to turn Buttonware into a
| full-time business.
|
| 2. Current stuff too, like Mike Perham's
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidekiq
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35566768
|
| mperham: ... I'm closer to $10m than $1m in annual revenue now.
|
| Mike Perham, Creator of Sidekiq: From Employment to Independence:
|
| https://codecodeship.com/blog/2023-04-14-mike-perham
|
| There must be others ...
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