Ask HN: Do you get paid to contribute to a open source project?

You gave the example of Firefox. In fact, the Mozilla organization, which manages Firefox has plenty of paid employees. See https://careers.mozilla.org/. The same is true for some other major open-source projects such as the Linux Foundation or LetsEncrypt. Being an employee at one of these organizations means you are literally being paid to contribute to open source projects.

I know one common technique for contributors is to put a bitcoin or donation type ID in their profile. This allows for people who see your contributions to go to your profile and give ya something back. Not sure how effective but this is one method I have seen.

I'm not a contributor but I've worked with core contributors to major projects. This is usually how I see things go down:

1) You work on an open source project and an altruistic company hires you to keep working on it. This is ideal, and I've only ever seen it once (Sendmail hired a couple of core contributors to keep making Sendmail awesome back in the 90s).

2) You work on an open source project, people see the work because they use the project, and then offer you a job to keep working on the project, but slowly over time you are working less on things that are great for the community and more on things that are great for your company. I've seen this a lot.

3) You get hired by a company that uses a big project, and they ask you to start making modifications that are useful for the company. It turns out what you did was useful for everyone so you contribute it back. Sometimes it turns out to be a huge win and so you keep working on it. I saw this with Cassandra and some of the folks at Netflix.

4) You create a cool project and your company lets you open source it. It becomes well known and then other companies want to hire you for either 1, 2 or 3. I saw this a couple times were people left Netflix to go to Facebook or Google to continue work on an OSS project.

If you work on Chromium or Firefox, you'll pretty much be limited to Google or the Mozilla foundation (with some exceptions). So if you want to do it to learn some great code but don't have a particular project that you love, I'd suggest one of the more infrastructure projects that are widely deployed if you want to increase potential job prospects.

In summary: There are lots of ways to get paid to write OSS, but you may not like them all.

If you're a student, GSoC does include a small stipend iirc.

I've gotten hired at my last 3 jobs primarily due to open source contributions I've done in my free time for fun. Instead of focusing on doing the code for money, focus on doing it for the challenge, the fun, and most importantly the networking.

By and large Open Source is how I make a living.

My major source of income is my "Varnish Moral License" (see: http://phk.freebsd.dk/VML/index.html)

It is not particularly easy to shake money loose, but I'm making a living and I'm trying to explain to the world that free software is not the same as gratis software.

(See for instance: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2636165)

As others have pointed out, the browsers are all backed by actual organizations with employees, so that will probably be a tough row to hoe, unless the end goal is to get employed by one of them.

The main benefit is giving back to the community, and possibly learning some new skills, and maybe building a github profile. I wouldn't depend on it for more than a little bonus every once in a while. Experiences may differ.

I got paid/sponsored to work on a couple of projects.

I had met some people from the company a couple of times and wrote something they wanted adapted to work with their products but didn't want to invest in it.

A few thousand to get me to do something I was going to do anyway at some point was a good way for them to get something that they wouldn't monetise directly.

Not sure how to get a gig like that though :)

Once my OSS project became popular, I started a business and switched to an open core model. Businesses buy additional features, I get recurring revenue so that I am paid to maintain the OSS and commercial parts.

http://sidekiq.org/

And to answer the inevitable question: many of my paid features are also available as 3rd party OSS plugins. Many companies prefer to pay for the commercial version so they know the features will all work well together and be supported years from now.

If you want an interesting way to get paid for OSS software, check this out: https://fair.io/

Basically the idea is that the code is open and free, but if someone uses it a lot to make money they pay you a licensing fee.

  - What is a user?
  - Why is it not applicable for library code (and libraries are *the* important assets in dev)?
  - What is a plugin?

You might consider talking to Tom Christie of Django Rest Framework. I know he's working on it full time now. IIRC the pay he gets is less than a normal salary, but there are plenty of upsides to the freedom and flexibility he has.

Yes, I work for nVotes/Agora Voting, which is an open source secure electronic/online voting project.

Some projects choose to use Gratipay. If you take a look at Gratipay's website their goal is to provide voluntary payments (and eventually a payroll system) to contributors for open work. Any team/project can apply to join Gratipay, but the main stipulation is that "public issue tracker with documentation for self-onboarding, and be willing to use our payroll feature."

https://gratipay.com/about/

Once payroll rolls out contributors set their own compensation.

Some more information on that can be found here: https://gratipay.com/about/features/payroll

Previously Gratipay was Gittip, and worked much like Patreon - essentially a donation or ~tip~ system.

There's still some work to be done, but I've been following this project for awhile. I've been working full time now on other stuff, but I keep up with their updates, and Chad (founder) is a great dude.

There are some organisations that build open source software and hire developers. We only have one open position right now, but we keep expanding our team. http://akvo.org/about-us/working-at-akvo/

Not directly, but given we use open source stacks at work, it is in the best interest of the company when we push patches upstream so there is no cost to maintain a fork.

Yes but not by others. I pay myself to do it (well my company does).

If I need something fixed or added to a FOSS project for $WORK, that's work related and it's perfectly reasonable to do so.

Now getting someone else to pay you is a much bigger stretch. Outside of a couple people who work for really big companies that market commercial versions (or support packages) for FOSS projects, I don't know of anyone that gets paid to work on FOSS.

Yep, I get paid to work on QEMU. I would suggest that your chances of getting paid to work on something and what kind of work that turns out to be depend quite a bit on the project. You can have a look at the git commit history or the mailing lists: if the project really mostly worked on by a single company (as I suspect may be the case with Mozilla and Chromium) then the only paid employment prospects are likely to be with that company. A niche project might not have any opportunities for paid work on it at all. At the other extreme, if you look at the Linux kernel it has a huge range of corporate contributions of various kinds (as well as a lot of work that's purely downstream) and you have better chances of finding one that does the kind of work you might want to do.

Incidentally, previous experience with the specific codebase isn't necessarily a requirement to get a job working on a project: if you have general experience in the field and can work with an open source community then these both transfer over (this is how I got into working on QEMU). Learning a new codebase is something that you typically have to do when you start a new job in the closed source world, after all...

FWIW, I don't think I'd get into a FOSS project just for the chance of getting paid. I think it's really hard to work on something you don't have an underlying interest in, first.

If you get a chance to go to a FOSS or Linux conference, there are normally lots of people there who are hiring or looking to be hired to work on FOSS.

(Nearly) all our work (github.com/hammerlab) is OSS. We're hiring experts in ML if you're interested in working on big genomic data in the field of cancer immunotherapy. We're a lab (academic not-for-profit, part of Mount Sinai's medical school, run off foundation, grant, and gift money) of software engineers from industry and academia in NYC trying to make research better, and cure some cancer while we're at it (running some clinical trials).

If you're interested in academia or scientific research, there is scope to work on open source projects there. My full time job is working on a particle physics data analysis program, which is entirely open sourced. You won't necessarily have to do a scientific project either - other people who work at the same research facility work on configuration management systems, or databases.

Note that this doesn't have to involve doing a PhD or actually being an academic - it's more a providing the tools that enable academics to do successful research kind of thing.

Yes of course you can get paid to...For example, we build an open source Android app called Umbrella, which is used to help travellers, journalists and activists manage their digital and physical security on the move (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.secfirst.u...).

We pay our developers to help us build it and we are currently hiring an Android dev. http://ie.indeed.com/job/android-developer-passion-human-rig...

Code is here: https://github.com/securityfirst

yes

yes

If you're into working on a Opensource Social Virtual Reality platform, we're always looking for contributors! http://highfidelity.io