10 years of full time open source
As been a while that I've been working on software and since the first days I've been passionate about open source, I think as professional developer is interesting having the access to the source of the software you are using, or being able to read the code wrote by other people that solve similar problems to the one you are trying to solve, so open source give all of that, and you can make it come together with some ethical requirements as well, but I'm not here to describe the advantages of open source, but to tell my story in it, so quite early of my experiences with software I started to use open source based software, like linux or IDEs like eclipse, together with a big set of tools that are common in software development, after using I found myself contributing here and there to projects, mainly solving my own problems, for both work and not work related, and as well starting small projects to solve a small problem in my own way.
After a while though it came on my way a not too unexpected opportunity, one of my previous manager had started a company that was selling support of an open source project and asked me if I wanted to join the company, and that was my first time to be paid to work on open source, the project it was called OrientDB (actually it's still called like that), I did like the project, and I was happy to finally contribute in a meaning full way to a project that was public and open, also a quite interesting project to work on the technical side. This is how it started, and it is how it countinued, I kept working on this project in the last 10 years, went through multiple company acquisitions, that changed the direction of that project multiple times, but having the core of the project open gave a guarantee that as far there were people interested in it, the project will continue.
And this is what happened, for the last 10 years I've been developing and maintaining OrientDB, all this time supported by companies selling support on it, or when these companies stopped to be interested in it, direclty helping anyone that needed help on it.
So as today 10 years after, I do still get all my income from open source work, and I hope this is going to be like that for foreseen future, as well if you are using one of the projects I work on, feel free to ask me for (paid) help, I will help you if I can.
Also feel free to sponsor me, sometimes things work just fine, but is not free to make them work just fine!
