How OpenSource developers pay their bills?

[Jabran Asghar]

Hello,

Not sure if this is the right place for this topic, but please bear with it.

The Open Source world is marvelous ... all the freedom, creativity, and support. I am loving it long since I entered it.

Just curious, how open source developers pay their bills? Is this all development is a result of one's free time investment (I understand, yes much part of it)? but again, at the end of the month one has to pay bills, isn't it? :-)


Jabran

[corosus]

As i understand it most developers have Day-jobs, and alucky few are payed by a company (for instance miguall icassa is bveeing payed by novell to work on mono, Ryan Gordon gets payed by the game companys to port games to linux so the game company's can use them on the servers)



A great recouce about this sort of subject is Floss weekly www.twit.tv/floss althou it's been dead in the water for over a month now.

[Tomosaur]

The nature of Open Source means there a lots of developers working on a single application. This means that any one developer may only actually be doing a very small part of the overall coding, or creating art, or whatever it is they're supposed to do. The average open source developer can spend as little or as much time as they like working on the project - but most have ordinary (paid) jobs too. They don't develop open source apps as part of their 'job', they mostly do it because they enjoy it, for whatever reason: they might just enjoy programming, or they may be interested in the end product and so are dedicated. In a propietary development world - the developers may have no real interest in the product, and so may not work as well as they can. This leads to problematic products, as the developers are more concerned with meeting LOC (lines of code) targets, or some other mundane 'assessment'.