A breakout session at WordCamp US 2026 in Phoenix, on making a living in open source when the thing you are selling is also the thing you give away. It is the 2026 rebuild of a talk I first gave at WordCamp Toronto in 2011, updated for a year in which a lot of people are quietly recalculating what their skills are worth.
Where and when
Event: WordCamp US 2026, August 16 to 19, 2026
Session: Make a Living Giving It Away
Date & time: Tuesday, August 18, 2026 at 2:45 PM to 3:30 PM
Format: Breakout
City: Phoenix, Arizona, USA
Event site: us.wordcamp.org/2026
What the session covers
The talk works through how giving work away has actually paid, across three decades of doing it, and where that model breaks. It is aimed at people who contribute to open source and would like to keep eating, so it deals with the practical mechanics rather than the philosophy: what you give away, what you charge for, and how you tell the difference before you have given away the wrong thing.
The 2026 version was rebuilt rather than dusted off. The economics of open-source work changed after 2011, and they changed again recently, so the question of what a maintainer’s time is worth is being asked in rooms that never used to ask it.
Previous outings
This talk has run three times before: WordCamp Toronto in November 2011, WordCamp Detroit a week later, and WordCamp Buffalo in 2023. Phoenix is its fourth, and the first at a flagship WordCamp US.
Attending
Tickets are through us.wordcamp.org. The organisers gave me a 20 percent discount code to pass on, so if you are coming, use speaker-friend20 at checkout. If you are going to be in Phoenix and want to talk about something other than my own session, get in touch and we will find a coffee.