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Making a Living Building Open Source Software?
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?"
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.
Take a look at Sendmail.org and Sendmail.com - one corporate and one OSS.