Tips and tricks on managing a published crate.

[hollow dirge]

This question is abit non-technical. I am curious how crate developers manage to publish a crate and still survive on it. i.e. still being able to keep a day job and feed themselves? while maintaining a public published crate? I am curious if there are some advice u guys can provide through your experiences.

[fading cypress]

Oooh, I like this question. Disclaimer: I've not made a penny of OSS work, so there may be some mistakes/false opinions, etc. I have worked on OSS projects through work/hobby projects and maintain/contribute to other crates, so my opinions aren't entirely baseless.

There's a few 'tiers' I see of OSS developers and how they put food on the table; spoiler most of them/us fall under the "do it for the fun of it" aspect.

Starting with those, I, like many others work a full time job 9-5, I contribute issues/bug fixes to crates as/when I please. Mostly weekends, mostly small crates, but the base of it is my money comes from work.

Secondly; there's a 'tier' I see of people 'popular in their domains', but not necessarily able to make it full time on crates. Github sponsors goes a long way here. I've given $100 to various people in the Bevy ecosystem because they've helped me greatly.

Thirdly, you have people like cart, alice, etc, who essentially get paid by bevy. There's so many people who would love roles like this, so competition is tight.

Fourthly, you've got game studios who will put out crates like Leafwing, their developers will work on those crates during work hours, they'll get help from the community etc.

Lastly and not so much with bevy, you'll find consultancies who can essentially "support" paying customers who want something that just works.

But yeah, if you want bread on the table, and you don't want the 9-5, look into github sponsors, find who sponsors who and why/what their building. Make useful things.

[hollow dirge]

Thanks for such a wonderful response, that's great insight for me :D