And how could one get paid to do so?
Look up “developer relations”. It’s kind of being an advocate for the software made by a company. Part of that job is to have respect so open source advocacy goes with it. Double goes with it if the software made by the company is open source.
I second this, I think this would be the closest, most stable paying position to what you’re looking for
I believe organizations like the FSF, FSFE and SF Conservancy employ basically lobbyists to help represent open-source.
And organizations like Mozilla, KDE, GNOME, openSUSE, The Document Foundation, Wikimedia etc. will have basically open-source community managers. So, where you could potentially help to steer an open-source community, as far as that’s possible.
But yeah, these positions are extremely rare. Like, we’re talking a few dozens on the whole planet.
People in these positions usually have made a name for themselves in other ways and have experience in similar jobs…That’s what I feared. Opensource needs a lot more marketing (and ads).
This is the closest job that I could think of to an open source advocate.
Yes. However, such positions are not common, because they rely on a pre-allocated pile of money being dedicated towards FLOSS.
When I was at Oregon State University, I worked for the Open Source Lab; you may recognize them as an option on your distro’s mirror list. During part of that time, I worked for the Open Source Education Lab, an outreach program which was funded by a grant through the College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (now the College of Electrical & Computer Engineering). This grant funded some get-togethers on campus, the local Linux Users Group, and some one-off interactions like giving talks to undergraduate classes about how to use FLOSS software.
But, when the grant ended, so did OSEL. OSL and the LUG are still around because their funding comes from OSL tenants and LUG club members respectively, but they are not focused on outreach and advocacy.
So there’s a chance 🙂
Out of curiosity, were you an engineer back then?
I was actually a music major! Software engineering is my backup career, but back then, it was my dayjob; I wrote code for the university during the day, and played music at local clubs at night.
Get a benefactor (or many) to form a foundation that pays for such advocacy or find existing foundations that fund advocates.
It is, for example, EFF has paid positions, and they’re huge advocates of FoSS. “Opensource Advocacy” is not the job/job-title, but it’s part of the job
Also there are companies that are FoSS at it’s core - but get paid by clients for consultancy work for support and implementation of their FoSS. They have paid positions for advocacy for their software
No it’s not. You just keep telling all your friends and colleagues how your operating system is superior.
The very few opportunities to be paid to promote open-source were all one-time events like hacker expo.
This might be something the linux foundation should invest in :/
I don’t think they will, there are thousands of people already doing it for free, you’ll likely find one such person in any mid-size business wiring up your network cables.
You’ll have much better chances to get paid if you provide some business model how to contribute to open-source software while keeping your profits flowing, because the business is all about competition and keeping things secret, and there are very few successful businesses based on open-sourcing their work.
I think the “for free” isn’t working out too well outside of servers. Desktop linux has minimal market share (even though it’s growing) and has grown a lot thanks to many users unknowingly using it with the Steam Deck - Valve hasn’t had ads for SteamOS or linux… ever?
And that’s just Linux. Opensource in general is basically unknown outside of somewhat tech literate folk. We need dedicate marketing and advocates to spread it in public institutions (schools, governments, utilities, etc.), make people aware that there are more options than before, get more branding, and definitely more awareness for those using opensource for the time to understand that a lot of it is made it free time. Many people see “oh it’s free” and still expect dedicated support with comments like “why don’t you just”, “I have this bug, I demand you fix it”, and so on.
Free advocacy leaves it in obscurity for most of the world and it will either stay that way or change very very slowly.
Educating users is much needed effort for open-source community, it’s also an unpaid and thankless job.
Google had made a huge progress by providing many schools with Chromebooks, but their target is profit and locking users into Google Docs, the fact that ChromeOS is Linux is just a coincidence.
Again, when you try to make some university buy Linux-based laptops, there will be Windows and Mac advocates popping up immediately, because the person making the decision usually gets the business side of things but not technical side, and Microsoft representatives will have convenient PowerPoint slides how their office suite is the industry standard and how you’ll save lot of money later if you buy their Windows laptops now, with preinstalled MS Office, and they will give you a discount too.
