[pipo234]

> It often amazes me how software that traditionally would take millions of dollars to build is just available for free.

Maybe this is just an in hindsight observation. Most of those millions of dollars were never spent developing FOSS projects created in free time as a labor of love. The money aspect only becomes apparent when the result can be monetized with 0 marginal cost, because copying bits has no marginal cost.

It feels unfair when you consider someone earning millions doing the bit copying, while nothing is passed down to the source of those bits, where the effort was done. But that effort can be framed as if it's "already paid for" (with love, scratching an itch, hoping to receive attention for doing the lord's work). I'm not saying the amount payed was "fair", but apparently it was "sufficient", because otherwise the project never would have gotten where it evidently is.