I urge you to consider how this will be financially supported before you begin.
You imply you'll burn through your savings for a couple years, then worry about financial support.
This is a huge red flag for me, and would strongly lead me away from using this project. Because it tells me this is a short-term effort which will die in a couple years.
MassTransit is going commercial because the offering has value, which (some) people are prepared to pay for. The people who aren't prepared to pay them are also not prepared to pay you.
Now, if you want to spend your savings and 2 years of your life making OpenTransit 8.1 then go for it. But make no mistake, in 2 years you'll be back on the market looking for a job.
Coding is the easy part. Getting funded is the hard part. Do the hard part first, and you'll do the easy part for decades.
By all means build a community, but figure out how that community will fund your time. If the can't, or won't, then you're really not offering anything of value.
Hi, Bruce, thanks a lot for your response. My financial plan wasn't there in the post.
So let me make it clear. My Software will be free forever. However, to support myself financially, I will mainly do Consultancy and some freelancing, and I will try to be a trainer in my locality (because I love teaching what I know).
However, I will also try to get sponsorship. If I get some, then good, even if I don't, it's okay since I am not solely dependent on it.
>> This would basically be a full-time job. How would I manage that?
I think consultancy and freelancing is also a full time job. And a difficult job at that. When you're not on a gig you need to spend your time lining up the next gig.
If you think this approach is viable then ideally drop your existing job to half-day (if you can) and spend your other half day doing consulting and freelancing. Once that is covering your existing (100%) salary then you can quit your half-day day job, and spend your newly free time on open source projects.
I get that you'd prefer to just dive into the fun stuff. But that's a poor way to do it, and typically leads to poor outcomes.
If there's a market for consulting and freelancing then by all means go down that road to see if it's there, and if it is sufficient.
If you build out financial security first, then you will be free to indulge whatever passion you like. If you passion first then all that work will be lost when you inevitably have to drop it (because you'll be working for money again.)
> I will mainly do Consultancy and some freelancing,
I am genuinely how did you ascertain working on this will have enough demand for folks to hire you to do consultancy in this space? I have in .NET space and have never heard of this tool before.
Plus, .NET is not that popular either compared to proliferation of python/java/node.js frameworks
Look at HN job threads, .NET demand is very limited.
I'm also working with .net since recently, my own take:
It isn't worth it, because those that already using it, will likely pay or migrate to a different solution.
I wasn't a .net dev before, so I was surprised that it 'abstracts' RabbitMQ, Azure Service Bus etc. This doesn't exist in the 2 other languages I've done a lot of work with -- even though we also have message bus. This is such a useless feature!
There's no need to use it, you can just use RabbitMQ with its original package, or Azure Service Bus etc.
People used it because it was famous, not because it was stellar in some way. There are so many other alternatives.
For O11y or other features, those are easily implemented or already even existing if you use Datadog / something using Opentelemetry.
So as I've said before, it's useless. It's something worth maintaining only for the people charging for it and those that are stuck with it, new projects will use something else.
I urge you to consider how this will be financially supported before you begin.
You imply you'll burn through your savings for a couple years, then worry about financial support.
This is a huge red flag for me, and would strongly lead me away from using this project. Because it tells me this is a short-term effort which will die in a couple years.
MassTransit is going commercial because the offering has value, which (some) people are prepared to pay for. The people who aren't prepared to pay them are also not prepared to pay you.
Now, if you want to spend your savings and 2 years of your life making OpenTransit 8.1 then go for it. But make no mistake, in 2 years you'll be back on the market looking for a job.
Coding is the easy part. Getting funded is the hard part. Do the hard part first, and you'll do the easy part for decades.
By all means build a community, but figure out how that community will fund your time. If the can't, or won't, then you're really not offering anything of value.
Good luck.
Hi, Bruce, thanks a lot for your response. My financial plan wasn't there in the post. So let me make it clear. My Software will be free forever. However, to support myself financially, I will mainly do Consultancy and some freelancing, and I will try to be a trainer in my locality (because I love teaching what I know).
However, I will also try to get sponsorship. If I get some, then good, even if I don't, it's okay since I am not solely dependent on it.
What do you think about this approach?
>> This would basically be a full-time job. How would I manage that?
I think consultancy and freelancing is also a full time job. And a difficult job at that. When you're not on a gig you need to spend your time lining up the next gig.
If you think this approach is viable then ideally drop your existing job to half-day (if you can) and spend your other half day doing consulting and freelancing. Once that is covering your existing (100%) salary then you can quit your half-day day job, and spend your newly free time on open source projects.
I get that you'd prefer to just dive into the fun stuff. But that's a poor way to do it, and typically leads to poor outcomes.
If there's a market for consulting and freelancing then by all means go down that road to see if it's there, and if it is sufficient.
If you build out financial security first, then you will be free to indulge whatever passion you like. If you passion first then all that work will be lost when you inevitably have to drop it (because you'll be working for money again.)
> I will mainly do Consultancy and some freelancing,
I am genuinely how did you ascertain working on this will have enough demand for folks to hire you to do consultancy in this space? I have in .NET space and have never heard of this tool before.
Plus, .NET is not that popular either compared to proliferation of python/java/node.js frameworks
Look at HN job threads, .NET demand is very limited.
>Plus, .NET is not that popular either compared to proliferation of python/java/node.js frameworks
>Look at HN job threads, .NET demand is very limited.
I think it just isn't popular for startups or people who read sites like this. Claude says there are 6-8 million .NET developers
“MassTransit is the trusted messaging framework powering mission-critical applications…”
https://masstransit.io/
I'm also working with .net since recently, my own take:
It isn't worth it, because those that already using it, will likely pay or migrate to a different solution.
I wasn't a .net dev before, so I was surprised that it 'abstracts' RabbitMQ, Azure Service Bus etc. This doesn't exist in the 2 other languages I've done a lot of work with -- even though we also have message bus. This is such a useless feature!
There's no need to use it, you can just use RabbitMQ with its original package, or Azure Service Bus etc.
People used it because it was famous, not because it was stellar in some way. There are so many other alternatives.
For O11y or other features, those are easily implemented or already even existing if you use Datadog / something using Opentelemetry.
So as I've said before, it's useless. It's something worth maintaining only for the people charging for it and those that are stuck with it, new projects will use something else.