[brigadier132]

There are a million reasons why people write open source software. From what I read, there is a sizable group of creators that make no money from their creations and actually struggle to survive despite having such in-demand skills and I was simply suggesting one way they could get by.

> on the oss projeft itself (especially if the request is about something not aligned with the roadmap of the project)

I disagree that it wouldn't be valuable. You can discover that things you believed were simple to understand were actually complicated or you can discover new use cases you had never thought of. But most importantly if you have no money now you can get money.

[j1elo]

Well for that subset, I would agree with you. I mean come on, you are making oss stuff that provides some value for some people, and you are struggling to get a decent income from other channels? It would make sense to try and maximize the surface area of all potential income generation activities.

But that's just a small subset of all cases, as you mention.

I've lived the opposite case: consultancy was the idea, but not enough people came in, with not enough frequency.

Talking generally, it feels ironic that if difficult to understand things get polished and ironed out, that source of revenue might and probably will dry out. So an incentive would exist to keep consultancy needs existing. (Edit: I am just digressing on this last thought, not talking about my particular personal experience)