It’s 11:43pm on a Monday night. My 6-week-old son is asleep in my office so my wife can get some uninterrupted rest for the first half of the night. He’s finally asleep now, and I probably should be also after a full day of work. But I’m not done for the day. Even though I’m a software engineer by trade, I’m also a computer programmer by hobby and passion. So I do what I’ve been doing for well over a decade now: I boot up my computer to write some code.
How many working people are doing it not because of the money but solely because they enjoy the work?
You’d be surprised
I seriously doubt it.
I can think of at least twenty that I know or knew personally.
deleted by creator
I would (and do) work on my own projects for free.
deleted by creator
How many hours per week do you spend working on your own project for free?
How many bug reports and merge requests do you get per day?
I promise you that the way you work on your own project does not scale to the level of big FOSS projects with tens or hundreds of thousands of users or more.
I dare to say 0.01%. Most devs, including open source devs are payed one way or another.
Sure, there are labours of love. But most aren’t.
Sounds like you don’t know the story of core-js. Any popular open-source is basically unsustainable without profit.
https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/blob/master/docs/2023-02-14-so-whats-next.md