Open source as a job

On the topic of sustainability in open source, what if being a maintainer meant being able to work full time on an open source codebase.

That means without having to be a consultancy, without having to sell future support hours. Your job is stewarding an open source code base - maintenance and updates, new features over time, documentation, community etc

For people based in the United States, having open source as a full time job means a comparatively very high salary need.

As an individual needing to pay for housing and healthcare, this will be $150K - $200KUSD annually.

TODO: grab links to discussion with Eleventy

From a global perspective, I think that this number will go down over time. Or rather, I’d like to see more developers in the global south make money at all. The global north is better equipped / has more privilege to pursue commercial pursuits that can yield a higher return. For the global south, we should start by getting full time paid positions marked to their local markets.