How important is the community
Apparently, your involvement with the open source community online has a direct impact on your pay structure. Bachhe discloses, “If an employee is part of an open source community and is contributing to the respective open source software, the depth and knowledge that he would bring in is different from someone who has just acquired the skills by way of adopting the software in a solution, or by way of training. The company’s faith in the use of the particular software in a project increases when those employees implementing the software are active contributors to it. In fact, Mindtree pays consultant-level salaries to such employees— who are either authors of open source software, or participate actively in the community.”
Sreehari Seetharamsastry, managing director, India Development Centre (IDC) Attachmate group, agrees, "Most of the time, they are paid at par with the other non-open-source professionals. However, if there are well established open source professionals in the community, they will get a premium. It takes a lot of effort, time and commitment from a good professional to build credibility in the open source community. So many companies would be willing to shell out extra dollars to get an established open source professional, since they will be able to influence the community through these professionals. In terms of remuneration, there is room for corrections since this is still a niche skill. There is also a need to factor in the costs related to traveling since the open source professionals need to travel a lot for attending worldwide conferences, which is a big motivating factor for them.”
In addition to increasing your package, contributing also adds to your credibility from an employer’s perspective. “Contributing to open source projects would be vital in the near future for showcasing the skill-sets. Involvement with the community is regarded as one of the most important aspects of a developer. Sometimes, just hanging around in IRC channels and reading mailing lists gives you an idea of where one can contribute,” opines Muthu Subramanian, an independent consultant who currently consults with Novell/suse (Libreoffice).