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I think there are a few answers to this.

1) There are a lot of worthy projects to contribute to. Should you work on Firefox? Linux? LibreOffice? OpenSSL? I think it's as reasonable to ask "where should I volunteer?" as it is to ask, "to which charity should I donate money?"

2) Fame/clout. There are a number of Internet-famous developers who work in open source. When they blog, people listen to what they have to say. When they file a bug on an open-source project, people fix it. When they start a project, people download it, try it, and contribute patches.

This is totally unlike the experience for ordinary developers. When most people blog, nobody reads it. When most people file a bug, or even file a PR, it just gets ignored. When most people start a project on github, nobody notices it.

Clearly there is a path, however narrow, from here to there. How, people ask, can I walk that path?

3) When people really are talking about an "open source career," they often are asking, "how can I get paid to work on open source?" That does require selecting good projects that have the potential to pay off.

4) In some cases, people are asking, "what are high-impact open-source projects where it's easy for newbies to get started?" Even once you've chosen a project, not all projects make it easy to submit your first patch.

> "how can I get paid to work on open source?" That does require selecting good projects that have the potential to pay off.

Or selecting a company. E.g. at our company (transloadit) >80% of work is on open source

I have to agree that it does help a lot with career if your open source project succeeds. That said, it's very hard to start a successful project that people might actually remember you for.

Note that working on open source will cost you money personally (in terms of missed opportunities).

If you spend 20 hours per week on your project for over 4 years, that's over 4000 hours... If you assume that your time is worth just $50 USD per hour, then you're missing out on at least $200k of income over those 4 years. You could have bought a small house/apartment for that money... Most open source developers will feel the pinch after a few years have passed. You will probably be skilled in a specific area but also exhausted and poor (a difficult combination).

So starting an open source project is like making a huge, very risky investment in yourself and in the hypothetical community which might form around your project.

Your future career path will depend mostly on your community's success and how much of an impact your project has on them.

5) I have some cool open source projects (Hydra / Mjolnir) that I would love to work on more but don’t have enough time for, especially considering my wife and I have 5 kids. Getting paid for working on it would allow me to add requested features or fix bugs.

Most of my problems tend to be pretty trivial, and those that aren't are at least easy to work around. While most of my open-source contributions are indeed bug fixes for things that affected me personally (which is how I noticed them), I find it much more satisfying to solve other people's problems. So having someone point out a thing they think needs improvement is a much better motivator than just scratching my own insignificant itches.

I work a similar way. I also tend to submit things that aren't quite right, or have fallen behind. Perhaps a Travis build matrix that's no longer testing current deps, or a project still doing things "the old way" that you can modernize quickly.

It's also been fun to fix things my "programmer heroes" write off as unfixable. I've picked up a couple bugs written off as "this test is just always going to be flakey because <whatever>," learned their test framework, proved it was wrong, and fixed it. Good for your self confidence.

Hey hi author here, the title is misleading (or click bait, yes). Inside the article there's a nuance though between shopping for things to fix (first time contributions) and solving your own problem by offering solutions to the community.

The obvious way is for sure to solve problems you already have, but if really you don't have any idea where to start and you still want to be in a community then it also exists and they are welcoming you.

About the "open-source career" usage, it's about engaging with different communities than your regular job but that's how I phrase it.

Thanks for the feedback still.

Digging into random open source projects is a good way to become a better developer in general, although I'm not sure I'd want to make a career somewhere random.

I'm a lot better with git, with various testing libraries, benchmarking, CI, etc - because I've dug into a lot of random projects. About a year ago, I started just digging in when I ran into something weird, rather than moving on or working around it. Sometimes it's more work than I want to devote, but when it isn't, I often learn an awful lot.

> So, what is it, what's the motivation to have a "career" in "open-source"?

Learn and work with people from all over the world, people who you never have a chance to work with in real life.

Some of us enjoy writing code for the sake of it. If we can channel that activity into helping good FOSS projects, even better, no?

this. Most of us encounter problems i.e. bugs, software we wish existed but doesn't - and then solve them through programming. We'd like to see the solutions get out and help other people too if they care to be helped, but I don't think that's a major motivating factor for many of us (not me at least).

Maybe I'm a grumpy old man at this point, but this whole post just felt to me like a distasteful marketing ploy which goes against the whole sentiment of open source IMHO, which is to solve problems share your solutions and let everyone do what they want with it - not to try to get X followers or foster the biggest community around a new slideshow plugin you just built.

> not to try to get X followers or foster the biggest community around a new slideshow plugin you just built.

I've run into this in interview questions in the wild. "So what open-source projects do you contribute to?" It's of course totally their prerogative if they prefer OSS contributors, but it wasn't a stated prerequisite to applying.

I loosely compare it to the points and review systems that are being pumped up to gauge one's worth in various freelance portals, etc. The gamification of everything. I can't say I'm a huge fan of that progression, but then I've never liked the zero-sum game worldview.

I work for a company that has some lines regarding IP ownership over content produced while in their employ, so any public contributions have to be unrelated to work that I do professionally, and the line is quite fuzzy as to where this ends and begins. Freelancing in software outside of my direct industry—generally fine, as long as its not fulfilling a service the company offers on some level and its not a competitor, or of advantage to a competitor. Publishing code that has benefitted the company is a grey area I'd rather not stray into. Therefore, I haven't contributed. We fork open source software (licenses permitting), and don't file pull requests. I've advocated for adjusting policies to play a larger role on the OSS community as part of larger new initiatives for both the improved reputation as communal contributors and for the benefits of increased mindshare, but to no avail.

> against the whole sentiment of open source

So the sentiment of "open source" is to tell people not to contribute to it? I say no.

If, for any reason, someone wants to contribute to free software, they are free to do so. That is very much the point of a free software license.

Our biggest advantage is that we can welcome anyone into our community.

Theres a world of ideas between talking about motivations for doing OSS and telling people not to contribute to OSS.

As pertains to what you're saying we completely agree.

I don't think open source was historically about simply sharing solutions. That is how it is for some people, but not really whole sentiment. First, if it would be just that, there would be much less complains about "freeloading". And part of motivation may be that people were convinced that freeloading is bad, but don't know how to not freeload.

The whole free software branch is all political, ideological with its own attempts to push for its own morals. I remember when quite a few people at school were arguing that writing close source is somehow bad ethically or that open source programmers are by definition better then all weak and bad close source programmers.

Stallman action was essentially political with a lot of heat targeted at perceived enemies. He was angry that licenses prevented him to do what he wanted. There was very clear political goal. If it would be about sharing, things could have been much calmer. Difference between FLOSS and FOSS would not matter either.

Large projects and communities have more then just wish to share behind them. It is too much work and effort to organize and keep them for it to happen randomly.

It boils down either to "it us cool" or "I want to do something idealistic and helpfull for others". Nothing wrong with either.

A lot of communities are also full of great people. Makes it fun and enjoyable a lot of the time. It's also education, you learn from your work and get fairly real-world experience depending on what you're working on

Jobs? Being active in the open source community can significantly raise your profile and career opportunities.

> because they want to pad their CV in order to get a job completely unrelated to free software.

I don't consider that to be a bad reason to be involved in open-source. People do similar things in other fields all the time. Serving as office-bearers in social clubs, on museum and non-profit boards, are all the currency of networking and business contacts. Why such a stigma around doing open-source to advance your career?

> Shopping around for something to work on without having a personal problem to solve seems like putting the cart before the horse. I assume that's not why people want to do it. They must already have a personal problem. So, what is it, what's the motivation to have a "career" in "open-source"?

I mostly agree with you but I think you've failed to think from a beginner's point of view. My problem is that most of the things I consider bugs are deliberate project decisions. For example, Moxie absolutely refuses to make it easy for Signal for Android to work well with Google Voice. It is completely idiotic and makes no sense whatsoever because Signal for iPhone supports this (there is no way for Signal to access verification text messages itself so it allows people to enter the verification number themselves). However, they refuse to allow this on Android. Just look at this stupidity: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/213980898-How-d...

Actually, most of the article is sensible but the decision to not allow people to type in their verification code that they have and forcing them to answer a phone call is completely idiotic.

And no, I cannot afford to fork Signal for this bug. >_>

I don't know perhaps you want to develop First Person Shooter games and high performance web servers Tuesday and embedded realtime operating systems Wednesday! Might to be hard to achieve on the "regular" market.

Open Source != Free Software

It's like the February and October Revolution. Free Software Movement was the first to emerge as a response to the Proprietary atrocious regime. But then a breakaway group that labeled themselves Open Source just like the Bolsheviks did in the October Revolution. Open Source twisted the essence of the values of freedom that the people wanted to bring about. Western Proprietary super powers also sent their soldiers to prevent Free Software from reaching the world's common sense.

Proprietary and Open Source will eventually collapse under the atrocities it does to the people. We can clearly see that in the NSA. People will become conscious in this lifetime or the next one. The revolution of the common sense will happen.