Ask HN: How do you make a living contributing to and/or creating OSS projects?

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've been able to quit my job and work full time on Marginalia Search, and starting with 8 months expenses' worth of savings and an incoming grant back in 2023, the project is now funded so I can keep going for several more years.

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...

I do it by working for Canonical. The vast majority of our projects are open source. Yes, Canonical's application process is very long and thorough, but it's a good company to work for. Those aren't "my" projects, of course; I'm still very much working for an employer, but it's nice that our development effort is in the open and freely available. I also maintain a few of my own open source projects, for which (via GitHub Sponsors) I get about enough for one coffee date with my wife.

If you’re aiming to be a "rogue" OSS contributor—essentially an independent developer thriving off open-source work—you’ll need a mix of strategy, skill, and visibility. Here’s how you can make it work:

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.

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ3w_jec1v8

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.

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.

[1] https://superstreamer.xyz/

You dont.

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.

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 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.

Step 1: Get a regular corporate job that allows you to work OSS some of the time

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'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...

[1] https://victorpoughon.github.io/torchlensmaker/

[2] https://www.recurse.com/

Building https://Algora.io for this :) open sourcing the platform this week (built in Elixir).

our goal is to simplify OSS bounties, funding and contract work.

would love your input. it's an open source Upwork for developers.

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.

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.

If you look at some famous(ish) projects that do this, there are two main ways:

* 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.

This is maybe not in the spirit of OP's question, but I do it by having successfully made the case early in my company's lifetime that we should open-source most of our code.

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.

FOSSjobs has some resources for this:

https://www.fossjobs.net/ https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources

One of my consulting gigs turned into a "fix bugs in and add features to OSS for us" job, that was good while it lasted. There are successful companies doing this for larger companies too, Igalia for example.

https://www.igalia.com/

Hard to live off donations. Probably won't be very stable.

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 hardware

Many OSS contributors are on the payroll of a company --or is that outside the scope of what you're looking for?

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

In general, you can’t.

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.

There might also be some local government grants for innovation and culture that can cover a bit of costs.

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 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 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.

Basically, you contributing / creating OSS has to be tangential to what you charge money for. IE, your code is critical to your service or business, but not what you're selling.

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.

I made a wall of pizza, where people on the internet can buy me pizza (but only if they really want to):

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. :-)

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.

- https://www.jimmybogard.com/automapper-and-mediatr-going-com...

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43558316

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

Why don't we all decide to start paying for software?

We pay for software indirectly when buying an iPhone or Mac.

I managed to convince my org that releasing projects as open-source was the best way to go (we're a hardware company, so this makes lots of sense). So now, my job is to create open-source projects from internal research projects.

In my time off, every business has made it annoyingly difficult to do this with any official capacity. I want to blame the fiefdom crafting...

The 'subtext' here is that I haven't found it particularly ~~profitable~~ sustainable by itself

OSS is a side hustle for most people that work it. It might turn into a full time paid gig for some but that's usually based on merit or just being in the right place at the right time. Which of course is nice but not something you can plan on having. Additionally a lot of OSS software is created by people that are doing this as part of their job at some company that happens to have some interest in a project or creates new projects.

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.

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.

As has already been said, by far the best way is to work for a company whose product is open source. I would find one that is fully committed to open source though, not just partially. By that I mean, a mainstream, money-making product of theirs is licensed appropriately (AGPL, MIT, etc). Going with a company that open sources a few libraries here and there is not a good strategy.

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.

[1]: https://www.davisr.me/projects/rcu/

build something popular then build a second thing that's as popular that's paid

it's pretty hard but that's what we did

Offer it as a commercial hosted service that you build on top of it. You can charge per use or per time period.

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.

Imagine doing something out of passion and goodwill.

Juust putting this out there:

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 ...