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Discussion on: Job title: Full-time Open Sourcerer

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javidcf

Being a full-time paid developer is great, and working on open-source project as a hobby is also great if you want to do so. But we should reject the idea of open source software as something that is done as a hobby. It is certainly challenging to bring together open source and a salary (at least in our current system), but developers cannot be to bring the same quality level and productivity to unpaid hours of work out of their (frequently little) free time.

Of course, many projects will only make sense as a hobby, but similarly some projects only make sense with some financial backing. And in fact the greatest open source contributors are private companies (Microsoft and Google on top), where many developers work as "full-time open sourcerers" (e.g. writing drivers for the Linux kernel, etc.). Writing good, useful software, open-source or not, is hard and laborious, and we should expect to be rewarded for it if we are to do a decent job.

(I do not mean it as a criticism to your comment, which I understand, but just as an alternative viewpoint)