Ask HN: How do you make a living contributing to and/or creating OSS projects?

I am guessing it's a hard thing to do unless you slam dunk something that hits absolute critical mass.

I have a bunch of repos with 500-1000+ stars. I've gotten folks who emailed me entire stories on how a project I created helped them get over being blocked on something, or how it kick started them into getting more involved with programming. I've on many occasions had folks email me asking me why I put some of the things I do up for free on GitHub.

All in all I've made around $17 in almost 10 years through donations (GitHub sponsorships).

But I don't do it for the money, although I'll admit it would be nice to receive income for doing something you'd happily do for free anyways. I create almost all of my projects based on a personal need and the idea of openly sharing what I can is built into how I operate given how much I've learned from others, I feel very strongly about returning the favor when I can with no strings attached.

I’ll second this. It seems that a lot of people assume it’s possible (or easy?) to make a living from open-source projects.

It’s probably due to a few famous projects being massively successful (think Vue.js), but I believe it’s directly tied to the project's size (audience), the maintainers' activities (conferences, etc.), and the type of audience. This last point is important—individuals are more likely to donate, while companies often need months of convincing, and it usually doesn't work, or they expect their logo everywhere with analytics (CTR, etc.) to justify it, which is basically advertising.

I have a sizeable seven-year-old open-source project (Mockoon) and, over its lifetime, I’ve received low four figures in donations, which is awesome, but far from enough to make a living from it.

Now, I’m creating a cloud version of the software, which has started generating revenue. It’s a lot of work, but leveraging the open-source success and sell something seems like a safer path.