> I don't love this framing among software developers. This framing is very transactional, when many of the authors are explicitly trying to make their work free.

This software was "free" (as in libre) and costed $0 and until now, it was licensed under AGPL 3. But contrary to one common misbelief in open source and free software, the maintenance is not free at all.

> The best thing a software dev can do is donate some of their time to do more open source development, and in that way we all benefit from having more and better open source tools. If someone wants to exchange code for money there are plenty of avenues to do that.

In the case of this project which took off, why would you expect the maintainer to work on the project for free?