Howto: Make Money While Hacking On Open Source Projects | Hacker News Reader

Howto: Make Money While Hacking On Open Source Projects

damnsmalllinux.org

44 pointsrw9 comments

One tried and true method is just to schelp your skills to some employer. Open source hacking is usually evidence enough to get you a good job. Sometimes, the project is even strategically important to the company -- Linux and Transmeta, for example.

There are a lot of very sane reasons to participate in FOSS, even if you only cared about money. It helps in getting hired. It's terrific technical practice. It builds a large set of technical links not tied to any particular employer, whom you can count on for good advice. It keeps you at the cutting edge of good practices and new technologies. And if you're starting a startup, you can find great developers through it. You can gain major hacker and media cred by open sourcing things.

In fact, open source may be one of the only methods, besides hacking with people in college or at work, for finding good cofounders. This is only a hunch, but it's one I'm betting on.

The only thing is that you can't immediately make money by that one particular method, but usually it takes a lot of experimentation to find a good business model anyway, and the network effects and the trouble of hosting things is often enough to keep competitors at bay.

We only hire people who have Open Source code we can spend some time with. How else are we going to know they're worth a damn? I don't have faith in my interview abilities to suss out the good ones (and Yegge's articles on the subject make me even less confident in that area). But, I can look at a developers past achievements and know whether they can produce good code fast.

Then again, my co-founder and I have both been Open Source developers for at least a decade, and consider it the "normal" way to build software. And it's definitely good for your employment possibilities...I've turned down several quite awesome jobs and recruitment attempts over the years (I turned them down because I don't enjoy working for others, generally, not because they weren't very fine jobs with very fine companies). Google among them (my co-founder was unable to resist the allure of Google).

Everything you said is true by my experience being involved in open source projects.

Another reason to do open source: it gives you a better chance of being able to work on something you enjoy because it connects you with like-minded people in the industry.

I think every programmer should be involved in some open source project. In most cases, a resume doesn't tell you much about someone's coding skills and real contributions, and technical interviews have many flaws in determining someone's qualifications. Only by looking at someone's code can you actually get a sense of their abilities.

It's much more interesting to interview someone who has done open source projects. You don't need to waste time figuring out if he or she can reverse a linked list. You can dive straight into more advanced topics.

I'm not sure about finding a cofounder though. I wouldn't feel comfortable partnering with someone if I hadn't gotten to know them by working closely with them.

I've always thought it would be an exciting development if enough OSS developers could be paid to do their work, à la Canonical or some of the other places that do that.

The trouble with OSS is that most developers are working on it part-time... if more projects had dedicated teams of individuals, I think we'd see faster iterations of better quality. For instance, desktop linux is moving there pretty quick nowadays, but it still takes a lot of time and energy and coordination to form a product as cohesive as some proprietary software (e.g. Apple).

In the Ruby community, quite a few of us donated to someone who wanted to work on an open source project for several months. He didn't raise quite as much money as anticipated but enough to spend a few months on a much needed library: http://rubymendicant.wikidot.com/proposal

This has been common in the Perl world for several years (I'm not saying that as a snarky "Perl did it first" kind of thing, just saying, "yes, this can work for some classes of problem, and here's more evidence").

A huge swath of Perl 6 is being paid for by small (a few hundred to a few thousand dollar) grants from The Perl Foundation, which is supported largely by individual donors.

The possibility of coding on FOSS projects while earning a decent income might be low, but the idea is intriguing. We could build a way to make such a route more feasible for our idealistic comrades. Or, it might be impossible.

Any hackers here doing something like the OP?

Our business (Virtualmin) is about 90% Open Source. There are only a few components of our products that aren't Open, and those primarily because they simply require so much tedious maintenance and are related to security. There are a few other features that are included in the proprietary version and not the GPL version because they are pretty much only useful for people making money with the software. It's probably not wholly the kind of thing the author of the article would approve of, since it does involve closing off some of the code...but the popularity of our Open Source projects have gone up notably since we started the company, so I think we're walking the fine line effectively.

I'm sure his intentions are good, but he could of said this in less than a paragraph. I think we're (HN) all competent on basic promotion/seo/ads/domains skills IMO. Selling related products, doing custom work and consulting seem to be the most ROI.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com