[wkat4242]

You're what's called an outlier. As a tech enthusiast you appreciate software.

I pay for FreeBSD and KDE. Because I believe in them. But I don't want them to make a profit. Once they do, the people receiving that profit will want to see a rising trend. Because business believes that a steady profit is decline, there must be growth at all costs. Once they reached the limit of what the market will bear, the focus shifts from giving the customer what they need to extracting as much value from them as possible. This is a death spiral because extracted value can never be infinite. The result is the phenomenon we now call enshittification.

The lack of a profit-driven approach is the only sustainable way to avoid this in the long run. Sooner or later it will always happen. Even if you have intelligent and ethical investors (which are extremely rare) sooner or later some sharks will buy it.

In fact the phase where a product truly has the customers' interests in mind is usually not very profitable but instead a gamble by investors, sacrificing short-term profits with the goal of extracting much more from the customer once they believe in the product and are too locked-in to leave.