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Making a Living Building Open Source Software?

Posted by Cliff on from the tricky-but-doable dept.

asimbaig asks: "When I started my IT Staffing and Placement firm last year, I couldn't find a decent Applicant Tracking System (ATS) or an Open Source alternative. I then found SugarCRM, and was blown away by its power and ease of use. Partly frustrated with the existing vendors and partly inspired by SugarCRM, I decided to write that ATS using LAMP. 6 months and 45k lines of code later, I have just released the preview of industry's first Open Source ATS/HR Management system, called CATS. Now, it will be an interesting experiment to see if I can actually make a living out of it and move away from my IT staffing business. SugarCRM seems to be doing well, so why not?. Is anyone out there making a living from writing Open Source code?"

3 of 66 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Donations by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    I run the Symphony OS project (http://www.symphonyos.com/) in what free time I have. In the last year since the project has grown a bit the best month of donations we have had was about $95. That was with one person donating $50.

    Over the last year the project has received maybe $300 between cd sales and donations. Out of my pocket for servers and other expenses in running the project (not counting time) I have spent about $2000.

    I am sure once we have a more stable release dontations will improve and I dont blame people for not donating to an unstable project, but even with a stable project I dont think donations is any kind of a way to make a profit. At best it helps offset the money you spend to keep your project going.

  2. Re:Funny. by asimbaig · · Score: 2, Informative

    I am working on an installer right now. Frankly I had very little expectation that it would be picked by slashdot. It was one of those strange days when you get up really early for no apparent reason...and start goofing off...I fired up the browser and submitted the story to slashdot. Didn't put too much thought in to it. You are right, I could have waited a bit more and have a more polished version. I think the source code should be out in another few weeks.

  3. sendmail by TheCarlMau · · Score: 4, Informative

    Take a look at Sendmail.org and Sendmail.com - one corporate and one OSS.