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A comment on Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself by ddevault on Monday May 18, 2020 @09:02AM (#23221762)
25 FTEs is an incredible achievement, and you should be very proud. The rewards are enormous - VideoLAN has a massive impact on human culture, more so than 99% of all businesses. Taking on VC to "grow" may be difficult, but is it something you really need to do? What you've built is amazing, and if you can sustain it at its current size, you'd be doing wonderful work. Endlessly chasing growth is a fool's errand, and you'll probably end up making compromises you never wanted to in order to get there.

I think one piece of wisdom I'd share about sustainable FOSS for this thread is: be happy with a smaller size. A FOSS business is probably not going to be a unicorn, but hey, that's okay, isn't it? If you're building software you and your users love, and you're putting food on your table, then you've got something to be proud of.

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Re:Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself by umvi on Monday May 18, 2020 @09:45AM (#23222207)
> 25 FTEs is an incredible achievement, and you should be very proud.

I know this is a stupid question, but I tried googling and it wasn't obvious... what does FTE stand for? "Full Time Equivalent?" Does that mean they are paying for 25 full time employees?

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Re:Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself by Closi on Monday May 18, 2020 @10:07AM (#23222477)
I usually take it to mean full time equivalent...

It usually means either 25 full time employees, or a number of part time and full time staff that equal the paid hours of 25 full time employees.

e.g. 50 part time employees that work half the typical working week would be 25 fte

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Re:Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself by ddevault on Monday May 18, 2020 @09:49AM (#23222254)
Full-time employee, I presume.
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Re:Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself by sgummaluri on Monday May 18, 2020 @10:04AM (#23222428)
Yes, FTE means Full Time Emoloyee
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Re:Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself by mkl on Monday May 18, 2020 @10:10PM (#23230648)
Not exactly, it's "Full Time Equivalent". If two employees are working half-time, together they make up 1 FTE, but not 1 full time employee (because there are two of them).
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Re:Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself by airstrike on Monday May 18, 2020 @11:26AM (#23223531)
It's full-time employee in this context, but if you ever need to search for an acronym definition again in the future try

https://www.acronymfinder.com/FTE.html

;-)

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Re:Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself by hckr_news on Monday May 18, 2020 @10:53PM (#23230869)
In my line of work, its full time engineers.
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