How difficult is to get supported in an open source project ?
Few minutes ago, I was reading an email sent by John W. Eaton, which is the maintainer and developer for the latest 16 years of the GNU Octave Project , saying that he’s looking for a job because he cannot get more funds in order to continue working on his project in a full time mode.
That email make me thing about how difficult is to get a job where you can do exacly what do you like to do, or if you are luckely, you will work with the technology and tools that you like. But if you have your own project, is very difficult to get sponsored, unless your piece of software became fundamental for some companies, some examples are Apache web server, Python, Gnome, etc. In other cases you are recruited to work with that technologies because you have the enought knowledge.
The good thing behind this “issue”, is that if your project is interesting, you will have a cool community supporting and contributing to it…
IT Companies that use open source software, should support them, support doesn’t means *just* donate money, but can be the way to donate the enought time to your employee to contribute as: time to give a talk, write some code, write some document, etc. In the other side, if you use an open source software and you are getting some money back with it, you should think about it… people as John W. Eaton need to get supported, why ?, because he’s doing a great work and you can give him the possibility to continue…
