Free software runs on volunteerism and generosity. Many contributors to projects like WordPress are hobbyists, volunteering their spare time to write code, test patches, edit documentation, and so forth. And another subset of contributors works for community-minded organizations that have made the conscious decision to donate employee time to the project.

And then there’s the freelancer. She makes her living using tools like WordPress, and as a result, has the chops and desire to contribute to the free software project. Yet there’s a particular psychological friction that can impede her contributions: for an independent contractor, every moment spent working on WordPress for free is a moment *not* spent working on WordPress for a paying client. Unlike the hobbyist, she spends her days working with WP – and, reasonably enough, she may not want to spend her limited free time doing WP too. And unlike the employee, she has a direct personal disincentive to contribution (not to mention a lack of institutional infrastructure to “absorb” the costs).

In this presentation, I’ll address both the *why* and the *how* of contributing while freelancing. I’ll lay out both an economic and a philosophical argument for why freelancers ought to budget for time on the parent projects. And I’ll talk about some concrete strategies for making the process less painful than it might seem at first glance. I’ll use myself as a case study, and talk about how my yearly earnings have steadily increased at the same time that the proportion of my working week spent on client work has actually gone *down*, to the extent that I spend over 50% of my time on free software work that I’m not paid for directly.