Wednesday, September 12, 2007

The Eternal Question

How do I get paid?

As we dive into our last year at school, Its on my mind: how do I get paid?  Can Open Source/Free Software pay the bills?  Can I live as nicely as the Jones'? Do I deserve to live as nicely as the Jones'?

Its nice for academics and long haired hippies to expose how wonderful open source is towards society, but they shop at the A&P whether people pay developers for the software or not... they train people afterall, they do not feed their kids on emails saying "hey man, thanks for the cool browser."

I suppose I could live on welfare and charity, surf off my neighbours insecure 802.11, and code all day long, but I am greedy for more.

Open Source: What's in it for me?  I want things; and by things I do mean things. I want big TVs, a nice house, a dog, a super powerful washing machine, a kick ass computer, video games, and I want not to steal wifi (gadgets fill the void of being a fat nerd sitting on a computer in the basement and unable to score with girls, lol).  How can Open Source pay for those things?

Does anyone want to give me a job to do some code in Mozilla?  (like seriously, some cash would be nice right now)

1 comment:

Lukas Blakk said...

I hear you. I too wonder how it's possible to balance a fruitful "day job" with the "hobbyist" aspect that a lot of this open source community is built on.

Not only "where is the money?" but "where is the time to spend with my dog and live people?"

I can only hope that this open source community does have ways of supporting its own and that if you do what you love, them money will come.