Fossjobs: A job board for Free and Open Source jobs

On Mastodon: https://floss.social/@fossjobs

there aren’t many such jobs

There's definitely a lot more I think but they just don't all get posted there. I know I've seen various FOSS jobs but they get posted or talked about in IRC, mailing lists for a specific project, etc.

But you're right to say there aren't a ton relative to non-FOSS jobs.

That got into 2024 postings fairly quickly. I don't get the sense that the data is very fresh or expansive.

It is ridiculous to post a jobs listing side without salaries or salary ranges listed.

As people who want to work we should just reject using pages like this, as this favours only employers.

"Senior Software Engineer (all genders) - Wikibase Suite"

wtf do they mean by "all genders"? Just write Senior Software Engineer, that is genderless by default?

The term is a gendered one in German. See also, e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14462318

Unfortunately, that's normal in Germany and many listing are German. Fortunately, this fucking practice will be illegal in a little over 4 months.

Who doesn't want a Free Job?!

It's a weird direct translation from German. The word for an SWE is gendered, but the postings clarify that the job is open to everyone.

More resources for open source jobs on the FOSSjobs wiki:

https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources

There are definitely a lot from big companies like Intel/AMD/RedHat, and some medium companies like Canonical. More on the FOSSjobs wiki.

https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources

it is fresh, but it is certainly not expansive. there aren't many businesses that work with and produce FOSS exclusively. and for all others it would be hard to guarantee that you are going to work on FOSS most or all of the time, so i'd think that not to many jobs even qualify

This shows just how low the salaries are in Germany. The salaries listed here, at 50k€/annual, were what I was making in 2012, when I entered Germany.

English is actually a weird language without genders in nouns. I.e. in Slavic languages you can say "male software engineer" with word "vyvojar" and "female software engineer" with a word "vyvojarka" and then lot of grammar is built atop of this fact.

Job listing are then trying to use something like "vyvojar/ka" to signify that both genders are sought for, but there is nothing like that in English, so you will get translation as "software engineer (all genders)" instead of using just "software engineer"

> Fortunately, this fucking practice will be illegal in a little over 4 months

could you elaborate?

Is there something similar that's just about contributing to companies' open source software? I like helping out projects while also gaining some experience, but most FOSS software has a cookie-licking issue.

I've contributed to Tweede Golf before and that was a very pleasant experience, I can't imagine they're in the minority here.

fe/male perhaps

Feel free to crosspost if you come across interesting ones!

I'm really confused by one of the Germany listings that says in parenthesis "all genders" are jobs in Germany gender specific or something? I'm thinking maybe "Senior Software Engineer" is gendered in German or something. I speak Spanish, and there's a TON of words that are gendered, so I could understand if this is just a case of German being translated and something being non-obvious to me as a result.

In german most job titles can either be masculine or feminine, and the masculine case is chosen "by default". Most job advertisements clarify that persons of all gender are welcome to apply. As the job advertisement is in english, it doesn't really make sense here.

They are just stupid, makes no sense in English to add that. In German it's something like: "Fireman wanted (not just men)"

Yes, that's what's going on: job titles are typically gendered in German, which leads to job ads being written in an awkward way to express gender neutrality. For example, "engineer" has both a masculine form "Ingenieur" and a feminine form "Ingenieurin", so a job ad might say something like "Ingenieur*in (m/w/d)" to mean "an engineer of any gender".

I think you kind of answered it "Ingenieur" and "Engineer" could be assumed to be roughly the same, so I could see the confusion there.

That trick with the asterisk reminds me of how in Spanish you'll see people using @ to do similar, @ being a place holder for two different possible letters specifically "o" and "a" which can be masculine or feminine depending.

This makes sense, thank you!

This EU directive will kick in which mandates (among other things) transparency for salaries

https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/pay-transparency...

> but most FOSS software has a cookie-licking issue.

A what issue?

I noticed the lack of freshness too, but I look forward to mining it for the organizations and then visiting their jobs pages directly to see what's going on.

In most languages, the male gender form is used also as the unknown gender. Not the default gender, but the unknown or unspecified gender. The distinction being that when the male gender form is encountered, it could also be an unknown or unspecified gender.

For another nice bit of related trivia, in Arabic the female gender form is also the plural gender form.

Happy to see that this lists jobs that seem to be truly dedicated to FOSS (even if the listings are limited).

One word of caution (from personal experience) to anyone dreaming of getting paid to work on OSS: be very, very skeptical of any VC funded startup whose flagship "product" is OSS. Regardless of the public messaging, you'll likely see: resources continually pulled, features intentionally withheld to make the private offering more competitive, community needs de-prioritized, etc. On top of that, "bait-and-switch" job offers were very common in my experience; promises of living the dream getting paid to work on OSS only to be transferred to an internal, commercial team a week later.

I'm sure there are exceptions to this, but, especially for less well established companies in the OSS space, caution is advised.

VC-Funded startups look a lot like post-secondary education where funding is a continuous issue. Been like that for many decades, unfortunately.

You seem to work for free too

LOVE THIS!!!

It's very difficult to find open source jobs otherwise.

An improvement I'd like to see to Fossjobs.net is a field for "open communication" too. Sometimes open source software doesn't actually imply open source communication or development in the open. AKA Android. And it would be nice to be able to see if the company or organization embraces open communication and or open development.

A lot of us think it’s endemic to VC. But how many other funding models are extant these days?

True!