[mschaef]

It's surprising to me that people are surprised by this.

Even setting aside the fact that the people that can do this work are few in number, the vast majority of people need a way to support themselves and their family. If the number of people that have these skills is low, the subset that is both altruistic enough to donate them for a sufficient period of time and personally able to do so must be vanishingly small. (And the negative feedback a lot of OSS maintainers receive doesn't help.)

Companies have the same issue... there has to be a fairly direct connection between an expenditure (paying developers) and a return on that investment. That can be a very difficult argument to make.