How to work full-time as an open source maintainer and earn a Google employee-level salary
Philip Valsouda, who left his job at Google and continues to live as an open source software maintainer, explained how he was able to become independent and how he earns his income.
I'm Now a Full-Time Professional Open Source Maintainer
Mr. Valsoda worked in encryption and security related work at Cloudflare and Google, but he became independent in May 2022 and switched to a life of maintaining open source software. Around September of the same year, he started working on various open source projects such as Go cryptography , age , and yubikey-agent , and as of February 2023, he is working in partnership with six companies. Mr. Valsoda spends most of his time on maintenance, uses the expertise he has built up to work on projects, and has grown to the point where he can earn the same compensation as when he was at Google.
Mr. Valsoda says that he is not selling his time to support others or the results of difficult projects, but that he provides the following three values by being involved in projects himself.
1: It is possible to reduce the business risk that projects that specific customers depend on will no longer be maintained, impacting security and development speed.
2: Establish a channel of mutual access and ensure better results for both the customer and the project.
3: The highest-level agreement allows companies to receive advice on any topic Valsoda specializes in, beyond the strict scope of open source projects.
Mr. Valsoda emphasizes that by providing the above three types of value, companies will benefit. Also, as you can see from the third item above, which says ``the highest level contract,'' Mr. Valsoda seems to divide his contract level into several stages.
Mr. Valsoda has only a continuous employment contract, rather than an hourly contract or a pay-for-performance contract with specific function deliverables. The agreement is available in three tiers: Silver, Gold, and Platinum, with Gold including initial and quarterly in-person meetings, and Platinum including advisory services beyond the scope of open source projects as described above.
The first step is to send a proposal to any company, pitch it to the people in charge and decision makers for several weeks, close the deal, and then send an invoice every month to get paid. The contract remuneration for each rank is approximately several million yen per year, which is much lower than that of a full-time employee, but in total it seems that they can earn as much as other software engineers.
'Despite their work impacting the Internet and, by extension, the economy as a whole, virtually all open source maintainers are either volunteers or full-time employees of large corporations,' Valsoda said. 'Maintainers are generally not paid. 'A small number of projects raise money by selling support contracts or getting feature-based sponsorships, but these are clearly not sustainable.' This is because people who volunteer are more susceptible to changes in their living circumstances, and full-time corporate employment does not scale up over time.
'What I'm doing is different and more sustainable,' Valsouda said. 'I'm hoping that this kind of experimental work style will be replicable by others. 'In the long term, I hope to become known as a professional path.'
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