I've been involved in open source for maybe seven or eight years now, and there seems to be this extremely bimodal distribution of maintainers. On one end, a small number of lucky people have secured enough funding to do open source full-time without having to compromise their livelihood. That's genuinely what I think we should be striving for — for all serious maintainers to be in that position. But on the other end is the vast majority, myself included, who get little to no compensation for the work they put out.

It's not that the work isn't valuable. It is. But unless you happen to be a deep subject matter expert in something, or you create the next wildly popular JavaScript framework or whatever, there's very little chance you'll see any meaningful income from it. Over the course of nearly a decade doing things online, I've received $6 total — and that wasn't even for software. It was for a 3D model I made to replace the feet on a cheap box fan because I was tired of mine not having any.

It's a little discouraging sometimes. Not discouraging enough to stop me, because programming is what I do and what I've always done. But I worry it does stop other genuinely passionate people from doing what they do best.

There's a real catch-22 here: there's no gradual path into funded open source. You basically have to do all the work upfront, and then maybe — just maybe — you'll eventually be compensated for it. Which is a tough ask.

The existing approaches feel insufficient

A few things have been tried. Companies assigning developers to work on open source projects is better than nothing, and it can be effective when the bottleneck is bandwidth rather than funding. But I don't think that describes most projects.

There's also community funding through platforms like Liberapay, GitHub Sponsors, or Patreon, which does seem to work for some people — but I don't think it's been widely successful for developers broadly. Though maybe I'm wrong about that.

There are also bounty programs like Algora or Issuehunt, where maintainers or sponsors can attach dollar amounts to specific issues. But the market for them feels saturated, and practically speaking, by the time I see a bounty posted, I'm functionally one of the last people to start on it — timezone issues make it hard to compete.

Maybe something like grants?

I vaguely recall that some European countries offer grants for open source work, though I'm not certain about the details. That framing feels potentially promising — treating open source funding more like academic grant funding, rather than expecting market forces to sort it out on their own. I'm not sure if that's the right answer, or whether the right answer even looks the same everywhere.

I don't know what the solution is. I'd love to be able to work on things I know are useful, that I'm passionate about, and still be able to support my family. But that's not where things are right now, and I haven't figured out what closes that gap.