With 1 & 2 alone, I'd be making about $34,000. Not poverse, but I am preparing to move into a 200 sq ft apartment in a couple of months. Consulting gigs help a lot - working on these anywhere from 0-24 hours a week brings me up to a comfortable standard of living.
I think what helps is that I'm a person, not a project. By working on lots of different projects, I get a lot of different people interested in paying for my work. The income from any of my ventures alone would not pay me a livable wage.
I've put a lot of thought into how to make money from FOSS, if anyone has questions or wants to send me their thoughts, I'm listening.
Question: do you see your income being suitable to live a decent lifestyle in the USA when supporting a family(1-2 kids) - paying for their healthcare insurance, other misc bills?
Rationale: if a career line can't sustain supporting a family, I usually think it's a gigantic waste of time (as a a full-time career) for the average person (who will want to have a family and pay for their medical care).
Maybe? It depends on how well Sourcehut does. Or, if I focused on consulting, I could probably make a very good living. If I were able to secure full-time contracts (i.e. 40 hours a week) at my usual consulting rates, I would be a wealthy man.
However, at the moment raising a family isn't a goal I have in mind. And I wouldn't characterize a desire to have kids as "average" - the birth rate is in freefall in the entire developed world and fewer people are planning on having children today than at any other point in history.
Normal people already can't have a family or pay for medical care. I can't fault anyone for wanting to code open source in order to barely survive, versus working several precariat jobs to survive and having no time to think.
My biggest luxury isn't money, but time and freedom from commercial pressures on my work. That's a quality-of-life issue making my subsistence WAY better than I'd experience working other subsistence jobs.
> If anyone has questions or wants to send me their thoughts, I'm listening.
Ask a company that's using your libraries heavily to hire you full-time and have you do internal consulting for them while still working on the project, mostly. That path comes with its own pitfalls, though.
That is the nature of most of my consulting work (it's generally related to wlroots or Wayland in general). But it doesn't work for any of my end-user software, makes it hard to work on several unrelated projects like I do, and sets up an unhealthy power dynamic that makes you subsurvient to authorities who care more about a bottom line than the project (see Redis for an example of this gone wrong). Those pitfalls you mentioned are numerous and difficult pills to swallow, too.
RedisLabs switched a bunch of their software to nonfree licenses and antirez can't really do anything about it. No matter what he says, I don't think he's in a position (i.e. financially) to oppose that decision by RedisLabs, even though it's clearly against the interests of the open source project.
Sorry but this is absolutely inaccurate. Redis Labs switched the license of a set of modules I never developed a single line of, so it was completely their work I never took part into. The Redis codebase that I and the community developed in the latest 10 years is, probably, one of the last few examples of popular codebases yet under a BSD license. It sounds quite natural that I don't have the right to say Redis Labs what to do with the code they created around Redis itself. I expected the power to say what to do with the codebase I was working on, the Redis core, and indeed it is yet BSD.
Yep but it is important to have arguments. I'll show mine, and then it's your turn to convince others. So this is the timeline:
- I start the Redis project, BSD.
- I get sponsors.
- Finally the sponsor becomes Redis Labs.
- I continue to develop Redis with my private roadmap,
still BSD.
- Redis Labs creates modules and other forks with enhanced capabilities, that were mostly out of the scope of the original project.
- Redis Labs changes the license of such add-ons to a proprietary one.
- The project on Github that everybody is participating to, and the only one I continue to develop, remains BSD.
Given the above, it's up to you to tell exactly what went wrong with Redis. If you believe for the story to be right that I had to force Redis Labs to license their code in a specific way, I think your reasoning is odd.
1. Donations directly via Patreon, Liberapay, and fosspay[0]
2. Paid subscriptions on Sourcehut [1]
3. Part-time consulting gigs [2]
[0] https://drewdevault.com/donate
[1] https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3C2019042616072...
[2] https://drewdevault.com/consulting (numbers undisclosed)
With 1 & 2 alone, I'd be making about $34,000. Not poverse, but I am preparing to move into a 200 sq ft apartment in a couple of months. Consulting gigs help a lot - working on these anywhere from 0-24 hours a week brings me up to a comfortable standard of living.
I think what helps is that I'm a person, not a project. By working on lots of different projects, I get a lot of different people interested in paying for my work. The income from any of my ventures alone would not pay me a livable wage.
I've put a lot of thought into how to make money from FOSS, if anyone has questions or wants to send me their thoughts, I'm listening.