Money gets involved when people want you to work on their stuff. Nobody really cares about other people's stuff. So either they do it themselves or they pay other people to get them to work on it. Sometimes even money doesn't get people to do it. I was offered money to develop some features on an open source project and I certainly wanted to take up that offer, the problem is literally days later I got engaged and that overrode all other concerns. I should probably see if the offer's still on the table when life winds down a bit.

> shouldn't we go back to the days when quirky nerds just built and maintained websites as a hobby?

That's what I do. And that's why my website doesn't have a new article every single week. Because I only work on it when I feel like it.