It's true that there's a much larger population of people (like me) who want to work full time on open source and would take a job if it was offered. But that just gets to what the linked article is talking about: companies don't generally "staff" free software projects with new hires. They hire the projects that already exist.
So basically the solution, if you want one of these jobs, is to get off your butt and make something people want. Then give it away. :)
I don't know... I'm not sure it's really a ton. And a great deal of it comes from companies that derive their revenue from something else - in many cases, proprietary software. Ubuntu, for instance, is all about Mark's millions made from the sale of Thawte.
> So basically the solution, if you want one of these jobs, is to get off your butt and make something people want. Then give it away. :)
And then hope it's useful to someone who makes a bunch of money via proprietary software or something else that's scarce, and that they hire you. Why not just make something proprietary of your own to be more in control?
Really, if you were handed a big check and told to build a team of open source people, you'd have a hard time doing it without poaching from Red Hat, Google, Novell or Intel.
And the final point was exactly what I was getting at. Getting yourself a free software gig requires pretty much exactly the same things as getting yourself a funded startup. In some sense it's a subset. Whether you want to make proprietary things or not is, I think, a personal decision.
My last big open source effort, Hecl, weighs in at something like 100K lines of code. LiberWriter, my first real "pay for it if you want to use it" project, doesn't quite pay me enough to live on, yet, but earns decent money at around 10% of the lines of code.
I did make some money consulting on Hecl, so it's not a total loss, and I had fun with it, and learned a lot. But in terms of the money, there's simply no competition: LiberWriter wins by a huge margin, even though it's simpler code that doesn't do as much.
The big difference is with LW, people pay me directly. With Hecl, it was a matter of hoping someone would come along and pay to have some work done on it. It's just so much easier to deal with the former in terms of cash coming in.
Certainly if you make something people want, people will pay you to develop it. I don't see a real problem with the model, though for obvious reasons the incentives are going to drive more people to startups than to new open source projects.
My point is that for people to start hiring you at a high hourly rate, there's got to be a burning demand, whereas with a product or app, the costs are much lower, so it's easy to spread them around.
> Certainly if you make something people want, people will pay you to develop it
Only after a certain critical mass, that is a lot higher than what it is for a proprietary project, where all sales feed back into the project. I mean, I certainly don't pay people to develop Linux, Postgres, Ruby, Rails, gcc or any of the other projects I use, although I do try and contribute back where possible.
BTW, strange but true story: I probably made the most money off of Hecl doing a BlackBerry port for... of all people, PASOK, the Greek center-left political party. This was all before the country ran out of money, and I did get paid.
It's not too hard... Open source coders are likely to write more open source software, so it's a good investment for the collectivity.
Interesting thing is that we currently give 1% of our profits to an environmental program through Patagonia called 1% for the Planet. Maybe we need a 1% for Open Source where companies can be encouraged to contribute developer or $$ to open source projects. Anybody want to work on that?
I think you are already doing it right, honestly. If you devolve 1% to whatever non-profit / good cause IMHO it's already enough. The real problem is that most companies will not do anything like that (1% is a lot), otherwise a few 1% to environment, a few 1% to open source, the world wold be a different place, entirely.
Sure its true, but it aint gonna happen.
So soon or later it's gonna happen maybe as everything is posing on this base.
But maybe some global "fund" should be used or something like that, I don't think that giving to the project you use is going to scale (we don't want a few guys rich, and nothing for all the rest, otherwise it's a company). But then bureaucracy starts to be an issue, who selects the right projects? And so forth. Not trivial.
Or maybe the solution is that if you are an enough large company, hire N open source developers. Like charity there should be a non written rule that most tech corps should follow. Like the 1% rule: hire 1% of your work force to write open source (and probably this would end being a largere return about branding than many ADs large companies run for more money than that).