This reminds me of the scene in Antitrust where Milo, the young computer scientist, meets Gary Winston, the Bill Gates / Steve Jobs figure, for the first time. Milo is set on contributing to open source, saying it will do the world good, but Gary asks him, "How many will be altruistic (with what you do for free), and how many will make billions off of your generosity?"
> Contribute to open source projects like Linux where they can't do that.
The Linux Foundation 2021 annual report [0] forecasts revenues of over $177M and companies are still involved in the development of Linux and other open source projects under that umbrella.
Either way, Linux devs and other open source devs are being "supported" by these big corporations.
They're employed by people who want them to make specific changes that drive their own interests, which are often for-profit (hence why they have the funds available to pay someone to make changes to open source)