How to get a free software job?

GNU Herds is a global free software job site and there is a UK free software jobs mailing list which has a healthy amount of traffic. (I subscribed to the list in 2005, and many thanks to MJ Ray for reminding me about it in the discussion on FSFE-UK that inspired this blog post)

Many healthy companies wholly or mostly working in free software sponsor of the GNOME and KDE annual summits and similar free software conferences. That’s a good list to start with if you don’t know many yet; try submitting your project URLs and CV to them. If they don’t have vacancies now, as they grow they’ll have you on file :-)

If you want to do consultancy, I’d recommend going self employed to begin with and then starting your own company or cooperative when things are underway - and getting listed in the Debian/Ubuntu/etc consultants/3rd party support pages, and doing some local marketing.

I’d also recommend going to conferences like the GNOME and KDE ones (FOSDEM is coming up soon) and chatting to people there who do work you admire.

Creative Commons License
The How to get a free software job? by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
January 10, 2008 |

Comments

4 Responses to “How to get a free software job?”

  1. MJ Ray on January 13th, 2008 13:26

    I believe that’s a repost/summary of part of http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.org.fsf.uk/5023 which doesn’t acknowledge any of the other contributors or the original discussion. Rude.

  2. David Crossland on January 13th, 2008 16:54

    My apologies for rushing and not giving attribution to your comment not in my original post; I have updated the main text appropriately, and hope this is okay :-)

  3. MJ Ray on January 13th, 2008 19:49

    Yep, that seems fine. Sorry for the curt message earlier - I think fsfe-uk-admin is making me cranky.

  4. David Crossland on January 13th, 2008 20:20

    I applied a tact filter ;-) http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/tact.html

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