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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Some more great advice on negotiation of employment contracts for open source jobs:<p><a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/688451/" rel="nofollow">https://lwn.net/Articles/688451/</a>
You build a career doing a job and solving problems, using specific skill sets.<p>Sometimes you're lucky enough to get paid to work on opensource projects or projects you've worked on become opensource.<p>I've built a career on open source technologies, mainly as a hobby that I turned into a 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.
Nice article from the best community expert out there.<p>I think the natural trajectory for a developer can be something like:<p>1. Work on it as a hobby<p>2. Hobby gets a bit too serious<p>3. Start charging an hourly fee<p>4. Get hired by company sponsor or start company