To add on here, this is how I've been able to do it
I started contributing to OSS in highschool, worked in closed source to get by, kept up contributions, eventually got hired by Citus through an HN Who's Hiring right when they got acquired by MS
After a year of working on OSS Citus extension I was moved to managed service. I continued to contribute to OSS by day tho as I would try upstreaming changes / fixes
At PeerDB (now ClickHouse) I'm again in OSS, & continue to contribute to other OSS projects as part of my day job. I'm fortunate to be working in a culture that respects devoting working hours to OSS. That's not really a coincidence when I've been doing OSS on the side for years beforehand
This isn't for everyone: I spend hours programming outside work, & I agree it's unfair to expect everyone to devote their off hours to programming. But that's how it happened for me
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...
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.
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.
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.
Man it is hard to do. It is about the same amount of work to spend $200 as it is $2,000,000, and that is really tricky for community supported (free as in beer) versions. If there is a commercial license - like one has AGPL or paid something else, or extended support for versions - that is much easier to purchase.
Donations are indistinguishable from embezzlement or corruption. I'm not saying they are the same thing, but your company accountant can't tell the difference.
I'm happy to buy something from you. But you have to offer me something to buy, so I can satisfy the accountant.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For supply-chain security, you need basically two things; 1) audit all the source code 2) build the source code (almost) without using any binaries.
The CREV folks are working on distributed code review, and the Bootstrappable Builds folks are working on building an entire Linux distro without any existing binaries, starting from an MBR worth of commented machine code.
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
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.
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
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.
I’ll second this. It seems that a lot of people assume it’s possible (or easy?) to make a living from open-source projects.
It’s probably due to a few famous projects being massively successful (think Vue.js), but I believe it’s directly tied to the project's size (audience), the maintainers' activities (conferences, etc.), and the type of audience. This last point is important—individuals are more likely to donate, while companies often need months of convincing, and it usually doesn't work, or they expect their logo everywhere with analytics (CTR, etc.) to justify it, which is basically advertising.
I have a sizeable seven-year-old open-source project (Mockoon) and, over its lifetime, I’ve received low four figures in donations, which is awesome, but far from enough to make a living from it.
Now, I’m creating a cloud version of the software, which has started generating revenue. It’s a lot of work, but leveraging the open-source success and sell something seems like a safer path.
>> It seems that a lot of people assume it’s possible (or easy?) to make a living from open-source projects
Eh? The only people who think you can make a living from Open Source (without working for a corporate) has never bothered to try. The number who have done it is a rounding error from zero. It's quite literally the hardest way to make money in software.
>> individuals are more likely to donate, while companies often need months of convincing, and it usually doesn't work, or they expect their logo everywhere
Companies cannot donate. People make donations, not companies. The only way to get a person at a company to send you money is by sending them an invoice for pretty much anything. Since you're giving the code away for free, advertising is pretty much all what you've got left to sell.
Repeat after me - Donations are not a business model. It's a hobby model.
Hosting can work at small scale. But I can host your product for less than you can. So if you're popular I can just host your software, and siphon off a chunk of your market.
69 comments
[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadI started contributing to OSS in highschool, worked in closed source to get by, kept up contributions, eventually got hired by Citus through an HN Who's Hiring right when they got acquired by MS
After a year of working on OSS Citus extension I was moved to managed service. I continued to contribute to OSS by day tho as I would try upstreaming changes / fixes
At PeerDB (now ClickHouse) I'm again in OSS, & continue to contribute to other OSS projects as part of my day job. I'm fortunate to be working in a culture that respects devoting working hours to OSS. That's not really a coincidence when I've been doing OSS on the side for years beforehand
This isn't for everyone: I spend hours programming outside work, & I agree it's unfair to expect everyone to devote their off hours to programming. But that's how it happened for me
[1] https://victorpoughon.github.io/torchlensmaker/
[2] https://www.recurse.com/
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.
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.
I'm happy to buy something from you. But you have to offer me something to buy, so I can satisfy the accountant.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
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.
Unless you are famous, its unlikely you will get enough donations to be meaningful.
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/
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
our goal is to simplify OSS bounties, funding and contract work.
would love your input. it's an open source Upwork for developers.
These are the methods I've tried (and known to work, at least for me):
The 'subtext' here is that I haven't found it particularly ~~profitable~~ sustainable by itself
- https://www.jimmybogard.com/automapper-and-mediatr-going-com...
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43558316
The CREV folks are working on distributed code review, and the Bootstrappable Builds folks are working on building an entire Linux distro without any existing binaries, starting from an MBR worth of commented machine code.
https://github.com/crev-dev/ https://bootstrappable.org/ https://lwn.net/Articles/983340/
So basically make things that are useful but hard to extend for anyone but you =P
Step 2: Work on OSS while doing your day job.
If you're lucky you'll find a company that actually uses said OSS!
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.
It’s probably due to a few famous projects being massively successful (think Vue.js), but I believe it’s directly tied to the project's size (audience), the maintainers' activities (conferences, etc.), and the type of audience. This last point is important—individuals are more likely to donate, while companies often need months of convincing, and it usually doesn't work, or they expect their logo everywhere with analytics (CTR, etc.) to justify it, which is basically advertising.
I have a sizeable seven-year-old open-source project (Mockoon) and, over its lifetime, I’ve received low four figures in donations, which is awesome, but far from enough to make a living from it.
Now, I’m creating a cloud version of the software, which has started generating revenue. It’s a lot of work, but leveraging the open-source success and sell something seems like a safer path.
Eh? The only people who think you can make a living from Open Source (without working for a corporate) has never bothered to try. The number who have done it is a rounding error from zero. It's quite literally the hardest way to make money in software.
>> individuals are more likely to donate, while companies often need months of convincing, and it usually doesn't work, or they expect their logo everywhere
Companies cannot donate. People make donations, not companies. The only way to get a person at a company to send you money is by sending them an invoice for pretty much anything. Since you're giving the code away for free, advertising is pretty much all what you've got left to sell.
Repeat after me - Donations are not a business model. It's a hobby model.
Hosting can work at small scale. But I can host your product for less than you can. So if you're popular I can just host your software, and siphon off a chunk of your market.