## Title Options Doing Open Source When Someone Pays Your Salary A Note on Self-Reflection in Open Source Neutrality Is the Quiet Job Nobody Talks About --- ## English Blog Post # Which Hat Am I Wearing Right Now? _Neutrality is quietly the hardest part of open source. It gets tricky the moment someone pays your salary — and staying honest about it takes more effort than anyone admits._ Here's something we don't say out loud often enough: most of us doing open source are paid to do it, at least part of the time. And this isn't just a hunch. When Google's Open Source Programs Office surveyed over a thousand contributors in 2023, they found that **82% of us do open source at least partly on paid time** — and only 18% are pure hobbyists working purely on their own clock. More than half do both, blending personal passion with a paycheck. So the romantic picture of open source as a world of unpaid volunteers? It's real for about one in five of us. For everyone else, a company is somewhere in the mix. That's not a bad thing, it's how a huge amount of great work actually gets funded. But it does mean that conflicts of interest aren't some rare edge case you might bump into one day. They're there from the start, for basically all of us. And it only gets more tangled the longer you stick around. Give it time and you're rarely wearing just one label. Maybe you maintain a project, help run a working group, represent your employer somewhere, and volunteer for something on the side. None of that is unusual. But every one of those roles comes with its own responsibilities, its own audience, and its own quiet set of interests. Keeping them straight isn't a nice-to-have. It's part of the work. So what holds all of it together? Neutrality. ### The one question: who's speaking? The single most useful habit I've picked up is asking myself a small question, over and over: **who's actually speaking right now and in what capacity?** When you give a talk, sit for an interview, or drop a comment in a meeting, which version of you is talking? The maintainer? The person representing their team? The volunteer? The employee? Those aren't the same voice, and quietly blurring them is how you end up nudging decisions you had no real standing to nudge. That's why, in a lot of meetings, people take a second to make it explicit: something as simple as "just to be clear, I'm saying this as a maintainer, not on behalf of my employer." The first time you hear it, it can sound a little stiff. It isn't. It's a small honesty that helps everyone in the room weigh what you just said and, just as importantly, it forces *you* to notice which interest you're really carrying in that moment. You don't need a formal ritual for it. You just need the self-awareness to flag it when it matters. ### Company belongs way in the back If neutrality is the principle, here's the practical version: **your employer should sit as far in the back as you can manage.** Open source is vendor-neutral by design. Is the influence actually zero? Of course not. Priorities exist. Roadmaps get shaped by who's paying whom to work on what — and if 82% of us are on someone's clock, that shaping is happening constantly, whether we name it or not. That's just reality, and pretending otherwise is naive. But the *decisions* should still come down to what's best for the project and the community first and not what's best for your employer, and not what's best for your own career. That last part is the uncomfortable one. Your personal goals have to take a back seat too. Not just the company's agenda, also yours. That's genuinely hard, and it takes ongoing, slightly awkward self-reflection. Anyone who claims they've got it perfectly figured out is either kidding you or not paying attention. ### Give people the benefit of the doubt Here's the flip side, and it matters just as much. When you notice this stuff, not in yourself, but in someone else, start from the assumption that they meant well. We're all human. We all slip. Most of the time, when someone's employer creeps into a conversation where it doesn't belong, it isn't some scheme. It's a person who just didn't catch themselves in the moment. Nearly always, a quiet conversation sorts it out. Sure, once in a while there's a real agenda humming in the background. We're people, that happens. But treating every slip as a conspiracy poisons the exact collaboration you're trying to protect. The whole point is that we're working on this *together*. We want to move the projects, the community, and the wider ecosystem forward. That should sit behind every decision and every conversation. And if a hard conversation is what it takes to get there, have it, kindly, and in good faith. ### The takeaway Wearing a few different hats isn't a status thing. It's mostly a reminder to stay self-aware. Before you speak, take a second to notice which role you're really in. Put your employer and your ego toward the back. And when someone else stumbles, assume good faith first. Project first. Community first. Everything else after.