Hire talented free software developers

Sourcehut is the home to some of the most talented software engineers in the world. Free and open-source software is eating the world, and we have front-line engineers with knowledge and connections to the free software community. We offer our services as consultants focusing exclusively on free software projects.

Why should you hire our engineers?

1. We live and breathe free and open-source software like no one else does.
   We have an intimate and practical understanding of the free software ecosystem. Our engineers publish and contribute to open-source code every day.
2. We solve hard problems first.
   We are good at quickly identifying the hard parts of a problem, and tackle these first. Our services don’t come cheap, so we spend our time where it matters most.
3. We pull solutions from across domains.
   By encouraging them to work on any projects they like, our engineers have a very broad skillset, from low-level graphics drivers to high-level ops & monitoring work.
4. We are used to hitting the ground running.
   Our engineers are constantly introducing ourselves to new projects. We’re not afraid to dive into any level of our stack and start writing patches.
5. We elevate the rest of your team.
   In our role as free software maintainers, mentorship and onboarding is a critical part of our work. We can efficiently coordinate teams of mixed experience.

Whether you have a greenfield project to develop or need someone to lead the charge upstream for changes you need to a free software project, we’re the experts you need.

What we need from you

We have a few requirements for projects we work with:

1. The output should be 100% free software, as defined by the Free Software Foundation. The code we write for you has to be published with a free or open source software license.
2. The work should be conducted in public, on public issue trackers, mailing lists, and so on. We don’t sign non-disclosure agreements, and we frequently welcome outside collaborators who express interest in the project.

Interested in working with us? Send us an email.

Our engineering ethos

Each of our engineers spends most of their time working on self-directed free software work, both maintaining projects and contributing to the ecosystem as a whole. Some of this work is on the product you know — our code forge — but well over half of our time is spent working with the broader ecosystem on a variety of goals.

Our mission statement isn’t “to build a great code forge”, but “to support and elevate the free software ecosystem.” Very often, this means working on projects with no immediate value-add to the code forge product, which keeps our engineers involved in the community as valued contributors to various projects. Our engineers are the maintainers of and core contributors to many important projects in free software.

Our process

Our engineers choose their own projects, and generally only accept consulting work part-time. As a rule of thumb, we usually start charging a higher rate for more than 2 days per week of committment. Once your project has been accepted, we will provide support resources from our engineering network, pulling in other engineers if necessary, reviewing code and assumptions, and lending assistance with planning, execution, and logistics. We also handle billing and price negotiation.

To learn more about the logistics of our free software consultancy work, check out this blog post on the subject.

Our engineers

Most of our engineers publish monthly “status update” articles on their websites, which go into detail on what they’re working on at the moment. Check these out if you want to know more about an individual’s experience or style.