Given the explosion of open source released projects I've seen over the past six months, I believe developers are getting compensated by the tool they are building for themselves creating real value for them.

I have a problem, I spend a few days building a tool that solves the problem, it works pretty well for me, and I release it to let others get value from it. They make tweaks to it, perhaps improve it, and I get value from those enhancements and bugfixes.

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mgfist 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Obsidian has a number of full time employees who all want to eat and afford rent

	▲	alwillis 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Obsidian has a number of full time employees who all want to eat and afford rent They have lots of sponsors [1]; you can pay $4/month for sync service or $50 a year, per person for a commercial license. [1]: https://obsidian.md/enterprise/

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0x696C6961 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The burden of OSS is dealing with PRs that you don't want to merge. The drive by bug fixes don't compensate for that.

	▲	bonesss 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There is no obligation to maintain, no obligation to merge. Copyright is just that, copy right, it’s not an entitlement. Free as in beer and free as in speech means those ‘contributors’ are also free as in Linus to go fork themselves. Don’t like it? Go fork, yourself. Want it different? Pay, money, make, it, happen. Don’t like paying? Go fork, yourself, harder.