How To Become An Open-Source Contractor

http://emiller.info/contracting-advice.html

by antiform • 18 years ago

103 15 18 years ago

pius• 18 years ago

Excellent article.

hhm• 18 years ago

I agree, it's an excellent article indeed. And also, note that its advice doesn't apply only for the open source world but to any kind of software contracting.

DarkShikari5• 18 years ago

It seems every day someone or other discovers this, and the sheer magnitude of money there is to be made (and the bonus: having fun while doing it). I discovered it early this year, when I realized I was only one of two open-source developers in the entire world with my specific expertise... and the other apparently has been rather difficult to hire.

greyman• 18 years ago

Great, congratulation. I'd be curious to hear more about your experiences. ;-)

DarkShikari5• 18 years ago

Last summer, I started working on x264, the only open source H.264 video encoder. I knew basically nothing and was experimenting with the simplest things and harassing the only other active developer for explanations.

Slowly but surely, I learned the codebase. Eventually, I got my first major patch in: a modification to the subpixel motion search that improved efficiency a bit. But I still found myself blackboxing most of the code due to lack of understanding. Bit by bit, I made more and more complex changes. I taught myself x86 assembly, and then SIMD assembly. I finally learned the subtleties of C pointers. I finally realized that the best way to learn how things work is to identify some way to improve them, and then go and do it--the process of doing it will eventually teach you how it works, even if solely by forcing you to ask an enormous number of questions.

By late winter 2007-8, I probably knew the codebase better than anyone else in the world except the main developer, Loren Merritt, who had been the sole maintainer for almost three years. I was still learning new things all the time, of course, and his knowledge vastly eclipsed mine. But this limited knowledge of mine got me a contract from Avail Media, who wanted an adaptive quantization algorithm implemented, primarily to stop the problem of flat textured areas being blurred out (such as grass in football games). Bit by bit I tried various ideas, and finally got a working algorithm in January that did the job tremendously well. This was committed into x264 in April.

I then got another contract from them to improve the VBV compliance (buffering for constant and limited max bitrate encoding), since they're interested in x264 for television broadcast purposes. I worked on this, which was eventually later improved upon by Gabriel (an employee of Joost, a company that uses x264) and turned into a complete overhaul to the buffering system, which resulted in much improved compliance.

Finally, I got hired for a summer internship there at a rather decent salary.

In the meantime, Adobe had released the latest version of Flash 9, which supported H.264 video. Suddenly, thousands upon thousands of websites were interested in switching--the old FLV1 video format was simply awful, and VP6 was only mildly better and, unlike FLV1 and H.264, very expensive to license. There was a massive flood of people looking for assistance integrating x264 into their toolchains--there simply was no practical proprietary alternative for the vast majority of these websites. Most of the low-cost proprietary H.264 encoding apps were non-commercial only (and much inferior to x264) and the higher-cost ones were simply way out of their price range (and arguably mostly inferior too...).

So, as a developer of x264, I was in demand. I knew the application better than almost anyone else. Everyone wanted me to help them. I got contract offers from Criterion Collection, Facebook, and others. There were also loads of smaller sites looking for more minor help, or even just quick guidance on IRC. x264 is now far beyond a tool for DVD backups, anime, and Scene releases; it was a standard tool used far and wide. And again, I am one of only two active developers. Furthermore, after over a year of being involved in development, I basically made myself an expert in both x264 and the H.264 standard, now knowing most of the code backwards and forwards and having read most of the spec at one point in time or another.

And what about the other developers I mentioned?

Well, the main developer was very difficult to motivate. He didn't seem to care much about money, and had a habit of blowing off past contracts. If you can convince him that some of his assembly code is suboptimal though, he'll be right on it ;)

There were many other minor developers--mostly people who submitted bugfixes or worked on one portion of the code. For example, Gabriel worked primarily on ratecontrol and buffering, which was the most important thing given his job.

And thus I was left as the single developer who was willing to take all sorts of contracts, available to do them, and with enough expertise to deal with almost any part of the application, code-wise, algorithm-wise, or simply usage-wise.

bigthboy• 18 years ago

- Code exactly what your client wants, not what you think the world wants. -

I had to point this out. Having been a leader on a good amount of projects that involved programming, I have completely lost count of the number of times someone didn't do their job and coded something completely different because they thought they were superman and could save the world by coding something else or coding it differently than what we thought. It turns out when their submission goes to be implemented, it doesn't work at all with the rest of the system.

sachinag• 18 years ago

As someone looking to hire people like this, I whole-heartedly agree. The one thing - make sure that you write for both the technical and the suit audiences.

It's my job to find resources and present them to the technical team, who make the final decisions. But they decide from what I present to them. If you can't speak suit, you can't get to the techs, who make the hiring call. (But the check has my signature on it, so make sure that you're nice to both of us.)

raheemm• 18 years ago

An inspiring article - so are the comments from darkshikari!

schof• 18 years ago

What areas are ripe for this sort of consulting? (Ignoring the fact that if you go into an area to make money rather than because you're rabidly interested in it, it's probably a bad idea.)

It seems there are two characteristics that would make an area ripe for this -- companies needing it badly, and some (real or perceived) barrier to entry that keeps legions of geeks from learning it.

Any other likely candidates?

How To Become An Open-Source Contractor

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