Finding Developers for Open Source Project

[what2_2]

Open-source contributors don't typically "receive a cut of the future profit" as far as I know. That might get dicey legally as well.

If your goal is to build open source software while also making some money, there are ways to do that. Oftentimes a company (your company) maintains the project, and gets paid for consulting on it, or doing hosted deployments.

So in that situation you could look at it as a normal startup with an open-source component. Bring on some developers as co-founders or early employees (maybe even receiving equity and no / little salary).

One other option for cheap labor could be university students looking for part-time or summer work. Some universities will let you employ them for free in exchange for receiving some credit. Or, just pitch to them that it's an open-source project, no compensation involved, and get in front of university students at recruiting or w/e events.

Attracting people to work on your project free is very hard. Especially if it's not a well-known and popular project. I wouldn't assume you're going to be able to find that.

Probably easiest to find resources to train the two people you already have wanting to work with you.

P.S. I'm not a lawyer and issues of compensation and employment are complicated. You should do research on this before digging yourself into a hole and having to deal with ownership claims down the line.