This is one of the only fields where the customer (developers) almost never pays for their own tools and instead builds their own or even to compete against another developer. Then, they later realize why human developers in open source burnout so easily.

Not even Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds make money on open source or free software despite preaching it. They actually make money from speaking fees.

"Open source" is now weaponized to price down entire companies to the floor and instead of humans maintaining the software, it is now coding agents doing the work.

Neither the free and open source software movement accounted for this disruption and they have become the new starving artists of the software world.

It is crazy how much of the tech industry - one of the biggest industries on Earth - still uses so much volunteer labor. Its crazy because in no other industry would people expect you to not only give away your stuff for free but do it in such a way anyone else can copy your stuff and edit it.

Torvalds got RedHat and VA Linux stock options and probably has a very good contract with the Linux Foundation.

I earn income selling copies of free/libre/open source software. Other people could too, if they tried, but they don't.