I was taking issue with your statement "most developers working on open source are actually getting their bills paid by working on closed-source software."

That's /completely different/ from who is a 100% open-source company. Hell, you could probably call my company almost 100% open-source, but we haven't contributed a hell of a lot back.

https://www.linux.com/learn/tutorials/560928-counting-contri...

According to that, volunteers (people, as you said, who are probably actually paid to write closed source software, and do this on their own time.[1]) are a significant force, but not the majority. It looks like the majority of contributions come from folks paid to work on open source (and give the changes back) by some company or another. Sometimes those companies are not primarily open-source companies. Some of those companies are not software companies at all. Intel probably has the clearest incentive here; if their hardware works well under linux, well, that is going to tend to increase hardware sales.

Now, of course, the Linux kernel may or may not be representative of other open source projects, but those are the statistics I find.

This also lines up with what I've seen personally; most people I know who contribute significantly do contribute some of their own time, but most of them get paid to do it most of the time.

[1]I'm not sure your statement is true even there. Most of the major contributors I know who put in significant personal time do get paid to work on open-source stuff when they get paid. I mean, if you have a deep understanding of a valuable and commonly-used codebase, well, when looking for employment, working on said codebase is very likely the highest value use of your time.

While I agree with your remark [1], it does not pay the bills.

Fact is, most people in HN like open source, but the reality speaks otherwise when you try to make a living out of it.

I have been through it a few times, so I speak from experience.

You did not read my remark [1], apparently.

>Again, I am not against open source, as I actually am an heavy user of it. But based on personal experience there are only a few markets where I see a possibility to earn money from it, at a sustainable level for what is expected in western civilizations.

So, you don't believe me when I say that you can get paid by a major corporation to work on open source software, to make that software do what the corporation wants, and to give [some of] those changes back to the community?

I mean, these are plum jobs. Not something just anyone can get. But, these jobs are also where the majority of open-source software comes from.

edit:

If you are saying that it's difficult to be an "ideologically pure" open-source programmer and make a living from it, we are not in disagreement.

My point is there are a lot of jobs in and around open-source, though; I've gotten paid to work with (and sometimes make small changes to) open-source software for almost half my life now. I in no way qualify for the 'plum' jobs I described where you work full-time writing said software.

But eh, really, the same is true for most systems programming. Most programming work is CRUD apps. Only a few really good people get to work on systems programming, even in the proprietary software world.

The open-source model means that those of us who keep shit running (or those who write CRUD apps) can modify small portions of more complex programs when we find problems that are within our ability to solve.

> If you are saying that it's difficult to be an "ideologically pure" open-source programmer and make a living from it, we are not in disagreement.

Yes, that is my point.