i've been reading articles and they all say that developers want to empower their software by sharing code and collaboratively writing it.. which makes some sense.. i also read that some just want to develop software to make the world better.. so i'm aware of that,
but how does a developer support himself financially?

recently, there was an open source software coordinator who decided to abandon the project because his family made fun of him for spending too much time and energy on something free.. this seems natural but why isn't this the case with other developers?

Quote from Gracia Dail on July 12th, 2011, 12:33 AM

i've been reading articles and they all say that developers want to empower their software by sharing code and collaboratively writing it.. which makes some sense.. i also read that some just want to develop software to make the world better.. so i'm aware of that,
but how does a developer support himself financially?

recently, there was an open source software coordinator who decided to abandon the project because his family made fun of him for spending too much time and energy on something free.. this seems natural but why isn't this the case with other developers?

Really good question!
Any ideas?

Quote from bussi04 on September 2nd, 2013, 01:50 PM

Really good question!
Any ideas?

Support contracts.  Give your work away but charge individuals and companies to keep it working, modernized and fixing bugs.  Companies especially will pay to make sure you stick around to keep things working; some individuals will do the same.  It usually depends on how much is riding on the software you wrote that they are using.  If it's critical software the business needs to stay in operation, you can almost guarantee they will require a support contract be put in place.

Now if you write take-it-or-leave-it hobbyist software, good luck making money off that.  I even had a University professor tell the whole class one day, "Never buy and never write what you can steal."  That should tell you a lot.