You should read the story of Denis Pushkarev, the guy behind core-js. His work basically props up half the modern JavaScript ecosystem and he barely got any money out of it. His post: https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/blob/master/docs/2023-02-14-so-whats-next.md
Jesus. That is just so wrong.
Whoa, I couldn’t read it all but. That’s a modern tragedy
That’s why OSS is a saint but also a burden.
Create something for everybody, needs money to eat, tries to make a little bit of money of it, it’s not “free” anymore, people chooses something else.
Remember the famous left pad incident? :D
I make my own coffees. Buy me a sammich.
I make my own sammy. Buy me a shrimp taco.
GNU enthusiasts
*Not paid open source devs
Is unpaid not a grammatically correct word?
I'm not a native speaker, but I think "unpaid" has a connotation of "voluntary" / "honorary", where the "not paid" aspect is seen in a positive light. "Not paid" emphases on "no money" in a more negative sense, I think.
But this feels like hairsplitting. (And some native speaker needs to validate this idea anyway as I'm not sure I got this right.)
From Oxford dictionary:
Adjective: unpaid
1. (of a debt) not yet discharged by payment.
2. (of work or a period of leave) undertaken without payment.
2.1. (of a person) not receiving payment for work done.
*Not unpaid *not closed *not destination *not clients
open source is not an active job decision. its a decision to participate in a project voluntary. nothing more, nothing less. maybe you did it, because you like to code. maybe you wanted a challenge, who knows... but money should never be the motivation behind this.
Unless money is the reason behind this, and you add or updated core functions that are needed for your customer base which you now can show ads with this software and your contributions and knowledge regarding this software. Offering your Installation, management or support services.
Moq intensifies
If you use open source you have an obligation when you make fixes and changes for your company to push up changes as a contributor.
As such you can "work" a paid job and be making changes to an open source project and still be contributing. The work for your company on company time isn't mutually exclusive. This is how nearly all open source Apache contributions are made.
I know people like to think that all open source software is nerds in their mom's garage, but that's FAR from the truth.
LinuxKernelDevs
AFAIR most Linux Kernel Devs these days are employed and paid by various companies for their work on Linux.
Linux is more or less a multi-million dollar commercial project, payed almost exclusively by the big tech players.
And they have actually problems to find "new employees" as this whole "company" is extremely toxic: C botchers playing empire building, which makes almost everybody back out very quickly.
Linux is the only usable OS since years, but let's see how long this will remain sustainable given how this project works.
Oh it’ll be “usable” until there’s a viable alternative…