Bill Gates became rich by signing an actually illegal monopoly contract with an as illegal monopoly company... not being able to code or date black woman.
Steve Jobs simply outsnored every other guy in the Silicon Valley to be eventually sponsored by Bill.
We acquired a horribly dark humor the tenure while reading about what our licences mean.
Only a very small minority (roughly 1% to 13%) of open-source developers make a full-time living directly from maintaining their projects. While millions contribute to open-source software, making a sustainable, direct income requires shifting focus from individual donations to enterprise funding or working for major tech corporations.
Direct Open Source Income
Donations & Sponsorships: Less than 1% of the top maintainers have a lucrative amount of sponsors. For the vast majority, this serves only as supplemental income.
Monetization Models: Developers who succeed full-time typically employ B2B models—such as offering paid enterprise licenses, managed cloud hosting, or paid support/consulting.
Platforms: Developers use platforms like GitHub Sponsors (which charges zero commission) and similar community-driven Paid Open Source Projects to collect funds.
The Six-Figure Outliers: A rare handful of prominent maintainers with massive networks or highly specialized projects make equivalent or more than senior engineering salaries (e.g., $90k to $100k+ per year).
Related Jobs & Corporate Roles
The vast majority of developers getting paid to work on GitHub open-source projects do so indirectly through full-time corporate employment.
Corporate Engineering: Companies like Google, Microsoft, Canonical, and Red Hat employ thousands of engineers whose primary job is to write, maintain, and contribute to upstream open-source software.
Community Consensus: As widely discussed on platforms like Reddit, while direct patronage via donations is rare and heavily debated, working as a paid engineer for a company that heavily relies on open source is the most common path.Are you currently looking to monetize an existing project, or are you planning your career path to work as a paid open-source engineer?
We are the poor fucks of the Industry.
#cyberpunkcoltoure #deggers
