Foojay Podcast #19: How Working For Free For Fun Brought Me Fame and Fortune – Or At Least Some Of Each – In The End
Plenty of developers spend evenings hacking on open-source projects for free. Some of them turn that hobby into a job, a company, or a reputation that opens unexpected doors. In this conversation we sit down with Tim te Beek, Maarten Mulders, and Lukas Eder to hear how their unpaid work led to paid work. This is Foojay Podcast #19.
What we talked about
- How Tim, Maarten, and Lukas got involved in their respective projects: OpenRewrite, Maven, and jOOQ
- Tim joining Moderne through his OpenRewrite contributions
- The story behind founding the company around jOOQ
- The difference between selling a product and selling support
- Open-source licensing choices and their consequences
- How Info Support encourages open-source contributions from employees
- What developers learn by working on open-source code
- Whether contributors owe anything to the projects they use
- Monetization paths for open-source maintainers
- The benevolent dictator for life model and its trade-offs
What stood out
Each guest took a different route from volunteer to professional. The common thread is visibility. Showing up, fixing bugs, writing docs, and speaking at events like FOSDEM put their names in front of the right people at the right time.
See the Foojay Podcast #19 for all info, shownotes, links, etc.