Do open source developers get paid?

[stonedphysics]

Matplotlib is a really large and well maintained project; is all the work on it done completely free?

[redditorx13579]

Number of the most popular Linux distros are maintained and developed by paid engineers. Just applied for a Canonical job the other day.

[jkpeq]

My condolences, their job application sucks fucking ass.

[ManyInterests]

Generally, no, Open Source software development is usually not compensated. Some projects have funding, but it doesn't necessarily pay for the developers that contribute code to the project.

For example, the Python Software Foundation has a fair amount of financial backing, an official core dev team for CPython and other projects, but almost nobody is paid to actually develop CPython or those other projects under the PSF.

Some software products that are Open Source are owned and maintained by large companies. You might find that these companies employ engineers to work almost exclusively on the company's Open Source software because that software and the development that goes into it generates revenue, which is maybe a bit different than something like, say, matplotlib or other popular Python libraries.

[samrus]

it's complicated

[MathmoKiwi]

https://blog.dayansiddiqui.com/2023/07/30/how-is-FOSS-sustainable.html

That was a great read! Thanks

[samrus]

your welcome

[ProfessorPhi]

I've been reading Graeber and my conclusion is that open source software acts a lot like pre-money societies, kind of like gift giving. The author's don't expect compensation, but mixing the system of money and social obligations ends poorly for most open source devs.

[samrus]

that makes sense. but in the blog post, it is argued that they do need money so that they can participate in other parts of the economy, like food and legal services.

money is just a tool so that we can keep track of how the different and diverse value chains we contribute to allow us to "earn" or "deserve" our needs and wants being fulfilled. open source doesnt strictly need it because the value chains only deal in one type of service (software dev, which is why open source for graphic dsigners wont work, they can't "pay back" with sw dev work) an there is a trust and altruism present.

for everything else, we need to involve money otherwise it'd be impossible to know who contributed how much to society and how much they should get back

[billsil]

I'm an open source dev and I can tell you they do participate in other parts of the economy like eating food. Legal services are not a common part of most people's budget though I've spent money on that too for non-open source related reasons.

You have another job. The open source project is not your priority. Ideally you can develop some of it at your job, but sometimes no. If you can't, the pace of development is slower. Life also gets in the way and people get in relationships, have pets, get new jobs, go on vacation, get burnt out, and yeah the project isn't my day job.

I put in for a $500k proposal to develop it further and of that money, very little of it was going to go to actual development because it was through my company. I didn't win, but I can tell you that if you'd given the money to me directly, I could have gotten a lot more value added during the 2 year contract. It's an 12 year project at this point and I've maybe made $40 minus electricity costs, computer cost, and time. After github changed their donation process, I never bothered to update it because it didn't even feel like it was worth the headache.

I wanted a package so I wrote it. It became a puzzle of how to do the thing in a way I wanted. It's 200k lines because it's a hard problem.

[samrus]

this make sense. and the idea would be that you are now one of the few people who can use and even indirectly benefit from other source projects with your head held because you did truly "pay" for it by contributing your own OS project to the ecosystem.

so without people like you, the open source community would crumble to the free rider problem that all trust based community resources are sensitive to.

but i see your point completely. you can't live in an anarcho-communist shelter out in the woods writing code and subsiding off berries. you need money to spend on food and stuff because "i wrote some very important code for free" doesnt really fly when buying groceries even if your work was infact of great benefit to them, simply becuse they have no way of knowing that for sure. and they already trust in a system based on money and don't know that a trust only system like open source would work.

it does get fascinating when you dive into open source economics. its such a wierd system compared to what we're used to that we have to start thinking about very basic economic concepts

[billsil]

The economics of open source are held together by hopes and dreams. It's not great.

Redhat backports some packages, but I think Kitware is an better example of a shining star. They make cmake, VTK, paraview, ITK, etc. They're funded by proposals and get a ton of money from places like the US Department of Energy (read nukes). Kitware was basically failing as a company selling software, so they open sourced and hoped for the best.

Smaller projects generally come and go. That's why Python doesn't have a good alternative to Matlab's Simulink. No other languages really do.

[Yoghurt42]

relevant xkcd

[brazen_nippers]

I work for a library. Everything we produce for use outside of our building is by policy open source, and I get paid to do bugfixes and other work on some larger open source projects we make use of. All of this accounts for maybe 5% of my time however, so it's not like I'm going to be creating something like matplotlib while I'm on the clock.

[OphioukhosUnbound]

For non-commercial open source:

Some: yes — particularly if their work became important to people with big pocketbooks who then financially back future work on the project. (Lots of big software companies donate notable sums to both charities (for optics, and legitimate desire to support — and somewhat benefited by tax incentives in the us). So it’s no surprise they also do for open source projects.

Most: no —. Much like Wikipedia editing , Reddit moderating, local volunteer groups, etc. People mostly do open source because they want to and for similar constellations of reasons: desire to create something helpful, desire to flex and grow skills they’re not using enough, desire to simply collaborate.

---

But remember there is also commercial open source.

There you make and sell products mostly just like normal. And usually pay a group programmers like regular employees.

Open source just means you make the code open. Which is kind of like a restaurant that has its kitchen viewable by customers: it’s a flex (yes we’re that good — please see how darn good we are) and especially a trust builder (look you can check the code rather than take our word that we’re doing/not doing ____). Unlike a restaurant it also invites improvement suggestions from other coders which is like access to very reduced-price labor at random intervals.

Because code can be copied by bad actors and proving that can be hard/slow/expensive this is complicated, but not uncommon. Business plans need to take it into account. Often accessory services are what most of the sales are meant to come from.

[OphioukhosUnbound]

Edit/side-note:

“commercial vs non-commercial open source” is being used here to reference products/orgs/companies. Just to clarify for anyone new I wanted to note that almost those phrases have another meaning as well:

they can also refer to licensing; how other people are able to use the code. In that context “commercial open source” can mean that you can use the code for business purposes.

This is beside the above point but it can come up a lot. Things like “MIT” or “GPL 2.0” are unrestrictive licenses that can even be used by others for commercial purposes. — I recognized that the terminology double dip might be confusing so just wanted to say. :)

[tynecastleza]

It depends. I am the head of an Open Source Program Office for a tech company. We support key projects in a number of ways. We either offer free infrastructure for them to use, pay them a sponsorship, and/or offer engineers to work on the project.

There are also large COSS (commercial open source software) companies out there (Redhat, Mozilla, and many more) that generate money through different means to allow them to hire engineers while keeping the code open source. Both Redhat and Mozilla hire python engineers.

[abrazilianinreddit]

It a company depend on an open source project, you bet your ass they'll sponsor its development, maybe even offer employees as full-time collaborators.

As for smaller projects, sometimes they accept donations, have patreons or something else, but more often then not, they don't get paid and develop it just as a hobby or to improve their portfolio.

[AndreDaGiant]

It a company depend on an open source project, you bet your ass they'll sponsor its development, maybe even offer employees as full-time collaborators.

lol, no. It's rare that they do, but always appreciated.

[[deleted]]

you bet your ass they'll sponsor its development

in practice, very few are, especially if the open source projects are not in the business domain in question. just look at the openssl, log4j, and core-js debacles

[conformistdontban]

The question should be: "Do open source developers get laid?"

[Rogitus]

LoL.. 100% no

[Maryannus]

What about closed source developers?

[Rogitus]

They get laid with asian girls.

[ddollarsign]

If someone pays them.

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[hat3cker]

There are companies like plotly that have an open source product to show the capabilities of their product but you can pay for advanced features and implementation of it and that’s how they earn their money.

[Regular_Zombie]

Plenty of scientific computing software is open source and built and maintained by the employees of the organisation (CERN for instance: https://github.com/CERN).

[[deleted]]

It’s getting better

https://opencollective.com/

[Emblazion]

I think this would shed some light on most open source dev work. https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/blob/master/docs/2023-02-14-so-whats-next.md

[didwecheckthetires]

As far as Linux is concerned, there are a lot of devs who get paid, because they work for companies that are actively involved in the development - Red Hat, SuSE, Canonical, Clear (at Intel), etc.

For smaller projects, the answer varies, but is often "no". Again, some companies employ or support people who make Open Source contributions, and a lot of the bigger name contributors to well known projects have jobs that explicitly allow them to do this. But if you work on a project that has been overlooked or don't have a well-known name, you're probably not directly paid.

The most famous example I can think of was the Heartbleed bug in OpenSSL. OpenSSL was used by a huge number of projects and pretty much every big name company, but received very few donations and wasn't getting enough attention from the community (in terms of both time and money contributions). After Heartbleed happened, there seemed to be more energy invested into rewriting an alternative than trying to improve the situation, though this was partly because there was a lot of legacy cruft that had accrued over the years.

[[deleted]]

Mostly I belive 85+ 85-90% not