The benefits of making money doing open source projects

What's it like to be an open source maintainer in 2024? In an annual Upstream tradition, we sit down with a group of maintainers to hear directly from them to find out. This year's panel includes Valeri Karpov from Mongoose, Irina Nazarova of Evil Martians, Tatu Saloranta of jackson-databind, and Wesley Beary, who maintains popular Ruby projects fog and excon. In this clip, Val shares his perspective on why earning money from open source projects makes a big impact.
Watch the full talk here: explore.tideli...
Transcript:
I think more open source maintainers should think more about how to how to monetize their projects, simply because, well, until we get to a stage as a society, where people can live entirely for free on universal basic income, which may happen at some point may not who knows, we all need to find a way to make money to support ourselves and our families. So if it's not via your open source project, then you need to work on something else, and then your work on the open source project comes out of your free time, basically. And I'm very fortunate that I can make a decent income working on my open source projects, but I know that if I had a full time job and my open source projects didn’t pay anything and I have to choose between: Okay, do I work on this open source project that’s sometimes kind of thankless and people are mean to me on the internet about it? Or do I go spend time with my kids? Do I tell my kids, “no, daddy can't play with you, daddy's gotta help this unappreciative person?”