[jondubois]

>> We had made the product so easy to use and so important, that we had out-engineered ourselves. Great for the open source community, not so great for us.

I can relate to this. The other sad truth is that if you do not 'out-engineer yourself', then your open source project will likely not even be able to get any users to begin with; it's extremely competitive. It took me over 5 years of work; constantly refining my project in order to reach almost 5000 stars on GitHub and 50K downloads per week. Those are pretty big numbers for a framework targeted entirely at developers but in terms of monetization, it's barely enough to cover a single salary and my project is one of the lucky ones because it's back-end and it's somewhat more opinionated.

Front end frameworks and non-opinionated back end tools (e.g. the ones that just implement existing standards/protocols) have near zero monetization opportunities. For front end frameworks, you need a huge success like Vue.js or React in order to monetize at all. It seems that Evan You from Vue.js gets enough money to cover his salary - But Vue has over 100K stars on GitHub and is one of the top 10 repos in the world. If Evan was a musician or an actor, he'd have a multi-million dollar salary for sure.