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.
Bounties & Sponsored Issues – Platforms like GitHub Sponsors, Bountysource, and Gitcoin offer paid opportunities to fix issues, build features, or improve security in open-source projects. Prioritize projects with active communities and funding.
Donations & Sponsorships – Set up GitHub Sponsors, Open Collective, or Patreon. This requires consistently contributing to high-impact projects and building a personal brand around your work.
Hackathons & Grants – Many OSS-focused hackathons and grants (like those from Mozilla, Linux Foundation, or NLnet) provide funding for impactful contributions. Target projects that align with grant programs.
Freelance Consulting & Custom Features – Companies often use open-source software but need custom solutions. If you’re an active contributor, businesses may pay for enhancements, bug fixes, or integration support.
Crowdfunding Specific OSS Projects – If you build something valuable (like a plugin, CLI tool, or framework extension), you can crowdfund its development via Kickstarter or similar platforms.
Merge-First Mindset – The key to sustaining this lifestyle is ensuring your PRs actually get merged. Engage with maintainers, follow their contribution guidelines, and build a reputation for delivering high-quality, non-disruptive code.
Content & Community Engagement – Write blogs, create tutorials, or host livestreams showcasing your contributions. Visibility brings opportunities.
It’s not the easiest path, but if you have the skills and discipline, you can make a living while staying independent.
Seems fairly important to somehow write or talk about what you do[1]. Building stuff and never telling anyone about it never got anyone paid. You don't need to become a shill, but the world needs to learn about what you're doing. Will say with full certainty I would not have been able to quit my job and do this full time if I didn't blog about my misadventures.
Risk of this being mostly survivorship bias, but I think in general it's helpful to build something that's more of an end product and not a library or some other widget in the making of products. Possibly also helpful if yours is an ambitious project that somehow seems doable. Ladybird is possibly an even better case of this going well. Exception possibly being if you end up as a linchpin tech like curl.
In general I don't think patreon/github/etc. donations will ever add up to much than coffee money. Most of my money has been from grants, one large donation from some rando anonymous person, and a nonprofit.
[1] Basically this: https://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-sur...
Unless you are famous, its unlikely you will get enough donations to be meaningful.
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 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.
Working: You make a living getting a job where people pay you to do something.
Volunteering Donating your time to do something that others may find interesting or appreciate. Yoo do it because you can and or you want to and or feel it as a duty or calling.
If you are serving meals to the homeless, it is a really bad way to get paid.
These days the common approach seems to put out some decent project. if you get traction and people get involved and like it, you create a pro version that is not open source, then you chance the open source license of the "core / basic" version and then profit.
* write a piece of software that can be commodized (the SourceHut route)
* become a consultant specializing in the software you're developing (the cURL route)
None of these things are guaranteed to work though. You need a good product for the first or your project needs to be the linchpin for many other things for the second.
Step 2: Work on OSS while doing your day job.
If you're lucky you'll find a company that actually uses said OSS!
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.
our goal is to simplify OSS bounties, funding and contract work.
would love your input. it's an open source Upwork for developers.
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.
https://www.fossjobs.net/ https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources
You could work for a company that open sources your work. You can consult. A very few people can make enough to live off from donations or support contracts.
But … ultimately I think it’s the wrong approach. Open Source isn’t a business, it’s a community commons. You contribute to the commons and use what others have contributed. Making it about money just means it’s now about the money, not doing something you enjoy as a member of a community.
Nearly every piece of code I write at work is part of one of those public, Apache-licensed code bases. Which means I spend most of my time working on OSS.
Are these projects the kind of thing anyone else will ever use? Probably not, so long as the company stays in business. The business case my team made was focused on transparency and long-term viability: our customers can see exactly what we're doing with their data and how our systems work, and if we go under, they have a realistic way to continue using our software. This hasn't ended up being a huge selling point, but customers have definitely mentioned it as one of the things they liked about us.
These are the methods I've tried (and known to work, at least for me):
- Work at a consulting company
- Work in a big tech company
- Start your own SaaS company
- Start your own robotics company and sell hardwareI 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
So basically make things that are useful but hard to extend for anyone but you =P
https://brynet.ca/wallofpizza.html
> How do you make a living ..
Oh. Still trying to figure that part out, this is falling^Wsurviving.. with style. :-)
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/
For example: My employer might open-source a C# adapter for an open-source C library. We won't make money off of the code, but it's a way to promote ourselves within people in our industry.
I once met a guy who consulted on making realtime web applications in 2010. (Before websockets.) His library and protocol were open-source; but the service was making changes to real commercial web applications.
- https://www.jimmybogard.com/automapper-and-mediatr-going-com...
We pay for software indirectly when buying an iPhone or Mac.
The 'subtext' here is that I haven't found it particularly ~~profitable~~ sustainable by itself
Either work for one of those. Or just contribute without any expectations about money. That's not for everyone but it kind of is how a lot of OSS gets created. And mostly hiring for such projects is done on merit based on being an active contributor. If you have a community of contributors, that's a great pool to hire from. You already know the people and their capabilities.
I have a few OSS projects on Github. Most of those are just things I'm interested in doing anyway. I don't mind giving that away. I use a lot of OSS as well in my non OSS development so I see this as just contributing back and being a good OSS citizen. My own little way of providing back.
And it's a useful way to make new freelance projects or jobs a bit less Ground Hog day. If you keep on writing the same code over and over again; just put it out there with some OSS license and next time reuse what you've already written. I've done that between a few startups now (where I was CTO so I could just do that at my discretion). Nice to not have to start from zero.
And there are secondary effects if you are active as a consultant or freelancer in the sense that having some projects that people actually use gives you a bit more credibility as a developer, as an expert, as somebody that knows what they are talking about. Minimum it's just a nice portfolio of stuff you can do. Maximum it actually helps generate a bit of business and inbound for your services. People don't pay for OSS software. But they do pay for support, consulting, etc. And you are the world's leading expert on your OSS software.
I dabble on the side (next to my main job as a CTO) doing occasional consulting on Elasticsearch and related technologies. I maintain a Kotlin client for Elasticsearch/Opensearch which is getting some usage and contributions. Mostly that's just something I use myself; so I don't mind spending some time on it.
Most of my customers are not necessarily into Kotlin; so they wouldn't be using my software necessarily. But it helps them understand that I know what I'm doing and talking about. And it gets me a bit of exposure. OSS is not a bad sales tactic to just put yourself out there.
That said, I have friends that have been able to spin open source roots into money, in one case really good money. Their paths were:
1. Find need not being addressed
2. Write open source solution for said need
3. Promote open source solution to drive adoption (yes, marketing is important in open source!)
4. Create training courses/material on solution
5. Sell training primarily to corporations and sometimes individuals for $
The other path has the same first 3 steps, but instead of training:
4. Establish a "support" department
5. Sell support to corporations
There's also the "open core" approach where you put enterprise features behind a pay-gate but give the basic product out as standard OSS. The biggest challenge here is that your business strategy will ultimately be in conflict with your community member's interests, which inevitably results in sacrificing one for the other, usually sacrificing community needs for the business. For example, consider you have SSO gated behind payment, and someone sends you a PR that adds SSO to your open core version. I would personally avoid this model unless you enjoy inner philosophical conflict with guaranteed losers and having to exert tight control on other people.
The support path requires your product to be a lot more mature than most people usually think as most corps will expect things like SSO, audit logs, and other enterprisey features. You can usually find customers who won't insist on that, but any of the medium to large fish will.
The donation model can be sustainable and even pretty good if you find the right niche, though expect to put in a lot of time/effort early on before you get many donations.
Lastly you could try the free-as-in-speech but not free-as-in-beer approach where your software is GPL but not free. Davis Remmel has used this for rcu[1] for example (which if you have a Remarkable Tablet you should absolutely purchase rcu!). Personally I love this model and am highly inclined to purchase when prices are reasonable, but it's not for everyone.
Regardless, thank you for being interested in contributing to OSS! I think most people are largely unaware of the importance and significance of open source in our current world. It is one of the greatest gifts you can give, and enables people to do things they otherwise wouldn't be able to do. Essentially everything we have nowadays is powered at least in part by open source.
it's pretty hard but that's what we did
You can look at Gatsby for a lesson here. They prioritized their team building the cloud offering and prioritized Gatsby Cloud for features that everyone was asking for like incremental builds, allowing Next to gain a foothold.
Then they sold to Netlify which has fully killed it. Will never forgive Netlify for that.
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.
1. Some people made good money from shareware in the early home computer days.
One example:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Knopf
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-File
Knopf originally wrote the software for his own use to manage a church mailing list, on an Apple II. Later, he ported it to CP/M, and then to MS-DOS. Other people heard about it, and started requesting copies. Eventually, the cost of sending out update disks inspired Knopf to include a note requesting a small cash donation to offset the expenses. The response was overwhelming, and when his income from PC-File exceeded "ten times" what he was making from his job at IBM, he decided to turn Buttonware into a full-time business.
2. Current stuff too, like Mike Perham's https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidekiq
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35566768
mperham: ... I'm closer to $10m than $1m in annual revenue now.
Mike Perham, Creator of Sidekiq: From Employment to Independence:
https://codecodeship.com/blog/2023-04-14-mike-perham
There must be others ...