[devnonymous]

Open Source Projects is a broad term. It could include a pet project with to large scale projects like the Linux kernel with a few thousand developers.

Here are some of the reasons monetizing is either not feasible or not desirable:

* for small projects, most contribution is done in free time by one or a handful of maintainers for a most part and some random flyby contributions every once in a while. In such cases monetizing would imply more work that distracts from the primary work of building software and the maintainers do not want to spend their free time doing that.

* even for slightly larger projects that possibly commercial companies depend upon, monetizing would imply a change in prioritisation in what gets done. The maintainers would be obligated to invest their free time in doing what paying customers need rather than what the community or the maintainers themselves want.

* for even larger projects unless the interest reaches the threshold where the maintainer(s) can quit their day job and depend on the money coming in from the monetizing it just eats into their free time for not enough money

There are other reasons as well about how to come with a scheme where those contributing do not feel like they are submitting patches just so that the maintainer(s) get to make money for their work, or just the principle of the thing about paying it forward to the community they got so much free (as in beer) knowledge and experience from.