This makes it sound like this is some antagonistic relationship where the OSS maintainer loses. But the idealistic scenario that you are alluding to[1] is about a developer who develops free OSS in their free time. And then, yes, very few end up paying or donating anything. But how is a predictable chain of events a loss? What is the “economics” of it?
[1] Some OSS developers do it as their day job.
In any case, what I meant by the "economics" of it is that in general a person can only afford to work for free for so long before they need to pay bills, eat, have and/or acquire a standard of living that isn't poverty. If they have a day job where they are writing this software in their free time, how long can they do this before burning out?
How does one afford to work for free? One has a day job. How does someone who volunteers for search-and-rescue afford it? That’s obviously a ridiculous question—they are volunteers so they necessarily must do something from nine to five. Or be independently wealthy.
But how does one avoid burnout as a double-worked programmer? I think we have ourselves to blame on that point since we have put the double-worked programmer on a pedestal. So we can either:
1. Not work on things both professionally and in our free time; or
2. Force ourselves to do just that because we gain something extrinsic from it that we might need, like simply keeping up with the Joneses (having an answer for “where’s your private GitHub” in interviews…)
https://changelog.com/posts/i-just-hit-100000-per-year-on-gi...
