Open source is not a good career path. It's hard. Bastard hard. It took me 5 years of running open source projects before one of my projects got popular.
What did I get from this? It gave me the flexibility to work for any company I want. It allowed me to meet some big startup founders.
That sounds great but I probably spent 4000 hours over 5 years on open source. If I had used that time to do extra contract work on the side, I could easily have earned $300k. I could have used the money to buy a house. Instead I have very little savings.
Open source is not worth it as a career. Only do it if you love it. Don't expect it to pay. Your project can have thousands of stars on GitHub and have thousands of users but it doesn't translate to much. The average Facebook or Google employee probably gets about the same amount and quality of career opportunities as I do... If not better. But they have savings, they own Facebook stock.
Career wise there is no doubt that open source is a mistake. And I'm actually one of the lucky ones... Most open source projects never get popular enough have any community around it at all.
Like the author said, it's all about networking. Don't bother writing code... Just blog about other people's open source work and meet people and you will succeed.
If you want to get an idea for how difficult a career choice open source is:
I'm currently working to monetize my open source project with https://baasil.io/ (with some cofounders) - The surprising thing I learned is that investors do NOT care AT ALL that your OSS project has almost 20k downloads per month and that you spent 3+ years of your life on it and are fully dedicated to it. Employers care, other developers care, but to an investor, it means nothing.
I applied to a startup incubator in Sydney several months ago; I showed them all my project stats (it's probably one of the most popular open source frameworks to come out of Australia). I hussled hard; I even managed to get tickets to a few investor conferences and events and, each time, I would talk to every person in the room. I ended up securing a coffee meeting with an investor (after talking to him at two different events; 3 if you count the fact that I had actually talked to the guy on the phone 2 years before about what I was planning to do; so he knew I was serious) and he recommended that I apply to an incubator in which he was a director.
I applied; but I didn't even end up getting into the first round of interviews (they just didn't understand the product or the market)!
They selected a bunch of other startups (some of which didn't even have a proof of concept to show).
Maybe the experience would have been different in another country.
The words "career" and "open-source" should not go together. Unless by career, one means working for free, on unpaid projects, without [local] peers.
There are few companies (Google, Facebook, IBM, RedHat, ...) that do open-source and a career there would be fine. But that's probably not what people think when they're talking about working for open source.
Running popular open-source project might also make it harder to quit and find good job. Employers assume you will run that project forever, and you might not have a time for full time job.
It seems to me that you need to be a good writer and be an interesting speaker at conferences. Just writing open source code is probably not a good career path. At least if you want to make some money.
[+] [-] jondubois|9 years ago|reply
What did I get from this? It gave me the flexibility to work for any company I want. It allowed me to meet some big startup founders.
That sounds great but I probably spent 4000 hours over 5 years on open source. If I had used that time to do extra contract work on the side, I could easily have earned $300k. I could have used the money to buy a house. Instead I have very little savings.
Open source is not worth it as a career. Only do it if you love it. Don't expect it to pay. Your project can have thousands of stars on GitHub and have thousands of users but it doesn't translate to much. The average Facebook or Google employee probably gets about the same amount and quality of career opportunities as I do... If not better. But they have savings, they own Facebook stock.
Career wise there is no doubt that open source is a mistake. And I'm actually one of the lucky ones... Most open source projects never get popular enough have any community around it at all.
Like the author said, it's all about networking. Don't bother writing code... Just blog about other people's open source work and meet people and you will succeed.
[+] [-] jondubois|9 years ago|reply
I'm currently working to monetize my open source project with https://baasil.io/ (with some cofounders) - The surprising thing I learned is that investors do NOT care AT ALL that your OSS project has almost 20k downloads per month and that you spent 3+ years of your life on it and are fully dedicated to it. Employers care, other developers care, but to an investor, it means nothing.
I applied to a startup incubator in Sydney several months ago; I showed them all my project stats (it's probably one of the most popular open source frameworks to come out of Australia). I hussled hard; I even managed to get tickets to a few investor conferences and events and, each time, I would talk to every person in the room. I ended up securing a coffee meeting with an investor (after talking to him at two different events; 3 if you count the fact that I had actually talked to the guy on the phone 2 years before about what I was planning to do; so he knew I was serious) and he recommended that I apply to an incubator in which he was a director.
I applied; but I didn't even end up getting into the first round of interviews (they just didn't understand the product or the market)! They selected a bunch of other startups (some of which didn't even have a proof of concept to show).
Maybe the experience would have been different in another country.
[+] [-] user5994461|9 years ago|reply
The words "career" and "open-source" should not go together. Unless by career, one means working for free, on unpaid projects, without [local] peers.
There are few companies (Google, Facebook, IBM, RedHat, ...) that do open-source and a career there would be fine. But that's probably not what people think when they're talking about working for open source.
[+] [-] jkot|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xmohit|9 years ago|reply
This sums it up pretty well.
[+] [-] davidw|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ktta|9 years ago|reply
I guess OSS is only for people who really love OSS not just think its cool.
[+] [-] nyan4|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gaius|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scholia|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ashitlerferad|9 years ago|reply
https://lwn.net/Articles/688451/
[+] [-] niroze|9 years ago|reply
Sometimes you're lucky enough to get paid to work on opensource projects or projects you've worked on become opensource.
I've built a career on open source technologies, mainly as a hobby that I turned into a job :)
[+] [-] maxxxxx|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sytse|9 years ago|reply
I think the natural trajectory for a developer can be something like:
1. Work on it as a hobby
2. Hobby gets a bit too serious
3. Start charging an hourly fee
4. Get hired by company sponsor or start company