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Many people get paid to write free software. Some people write free software and sell it (for example, some paid android and iphone apps have their code available under the GPL, but still make money). There are many companies, including facebook/google/etc, that employ kernel developers who primarily write free software. There are companies that follow the opencore model, and many of their developers only work on the open portion (e.g. elasticsearch, mongodb, nginx, etc). There are some people who offer consulting for their free software and make good money by that. There are some companies where almost all development is free software, and money is gotten through other means (e.g. mozilla, redhat). Free software does not have to mean working for free. It doesn't even mean you can't charge money for it (free as in libre, not free as in beer). That being said, I agree that funding free software development is a large problem. Right now, the most sustainable model is a company to be interested in a project and to pay developers to work on it (e.g. linux), or for a company to own the project (e.g. firefox, mongodb). There's no great funding story I know of for open source projects that are important, but maintained by people on the side (e.g. most of gnu coreutils, random libraries big projects depend on, etc). However, your comment sounds more grim than reality is, and also conflates free as in libre with free as in beer. Yeah, sure, you can't work for free, but that doesn't mean you can't make free software and charge people for it. |
We pay eventually -- in this case the "free" software is paid for with a loss of freedom elsewhere, in this case by giving up your private information and fulfilling our role as as "consumers" using their code.
There are many that would rather actually pay in a transparent fashion.