A lot of these projects are made in people's leisure time, without profitability, for other fellow geeks, and the users also uses them in their hobbies. And as fellow geeks, we are more likely to be financially poised to be on the other side of the equation: getting paid to write code, rather than being able to pay a developer's wage, at least not in the long term, not in any maintainable manner. Can you afford to pay yourself 3k/month to maintain such a project, without any profitability, just for a hobby?
Agreed. Also often the gap between what people will pay for a hobby project and what money is being made at a tech company by the people who have the hobby is vast. Sometimes there are contractual restrictions on taking money from other jobs simultaneously that complicate it.
