The 2024 Tidelift state of the open source maintainer report (https://explore.tidelift.com/2024-survey) disagrees. And that is probably the most comprehensive one that actually favors large projects, because of Tidelift business model.
> The portion of respondents who reported they are unpaid hobbyists remains at 60 percent, the same as in last year's survey.
Only 12% checked "I'm a semi-professional maintainer, and earn most of my income from maintaining projects." 24% checked "some of my income from maintaining projects"
The site keeps shoving a data colleciton popup in my face so I can't read it - what's the sample/methodology for a "maintainer" here? Do they normalize against the usage of their output projects at all?
Are those projects the size of Jetbrains IDEs - e.g. Linux kernel, ffmpeg, VIM, Emacs, etc. ?
I don't think so. If you're saying that in big projects (e.g. Linux) most developers are paid, sure, but those projects are a drop in the ocean of open source projects. I doubt very much that there are more paid than unpaid OSS developers but neither of us are bringing numbers.
Doing charity work does not mean you don't expect to be paid for your regular work. Also, a lot of companies do pay devs to work on open source projects.
Open source isn't charity - just like playing non-professional sports isn't charity: the vast majority of participants see it as a hobby or social activity. A minority get paid, and a minority of the minority "break even", but vast majority are playing in self-organized leagues and pick up games, which are in no shape or form charities (even if the public can watch for free as a side-effect).
That is exactly the point, those using the free tools expect to be paid, while feeling entitled about those free tools capabilities and zero monetary contributions.
