ProgrammerHumor
buyMeAcoffee
Discussion
*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.
Remember the famous left pad incident? :D
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
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.
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.