The first generation of open source devs did it for fun and ideological reasons. Back then, before any of the big tech companies even existed (except Microsoft, who was widely hated) software was not a highly paid profession, more in line with being a CPA, so people looking to maximize their earning potential weren't in the field at all. Those people did finance back then.
I nearly down-voted this question because every time funding and open source come up together, there will be a lot of arguments about it.
But to answer your question: Debian maintainers are not paid to maintain Debian. People volunteer to work on the Debian project because it's something they use, love, and believe in. Working on Debian is where they get their passion and joy, money comes from somewhere else.
A few maintainers few _might_ get paid by their employer to work on Debian packages that the employer has a vested interest in. As an example, there were some Canonical employees who were also Debian maintainers, but I don't know if this is still true today. I think there are a few companies that tend to hire established Debian developers, like Freexian.
Do you feel like Debian has it different (worse) than other distributions? Does Debian not have the same number of maintainers paid by corporations, etc.? Like in comparison to Ubuntu or Redhat?
This is the open source paradox. Fun, fame, power/control, employment... If you think about it, with how useful/critical some open source projects and distributions are, it seems bizarre to have what amounts to a "group of monks of yore" maintaining it vs government funded.
making music is a lot more fun than making software and way more immediately, personally, and emotionally fulfilling
I say this as an accomplished programmer and an absolutely shit musician. the parts of programming that are fun and the parts that make money, also, have almost no overlap whatsoever
lucrative business problems that are also fun or interesting computer science problems are so rare that whole companies are built around a single interesting CS problem surrounded by a fleet of mundane business problems
>I say this as an accomplished programmer and an absolutely shit musician. the parts of programming that are fun and the parts that make money, also, have almost no overlap whatsoever
This hasn't been my experience. While it's certainly true that much of my time as a corporate cog has been wasted in non-fun things like department meetings and stand-ups and Jira and MS Office documents and reviewing or debugging bad code from other devs, there's also been some time working on genuinely interesting programming problems.
But you're right about music: interesting programming assignments don't come along every day, whereas I can pick up my guitar at any time and play something (however badly) and hear something nice right away.
As others are said Debian developers aren't paid, by Debian at least.
Many of us use Debian in our day jobs. I used to Windows at first because there was very little else, ran away to RedHat when it became clear it's very hard to develop something reliable on a base that is a black box and so unreliable and had abysmal support, ran away from RedHat to Debian at about the time of the Fedora / RedHat enterprise split because they pushed a minor update with so many incompatibilities it broke my systems.
In Debian I found a whole pile of like minded sysadmins/system builders working collaboratively on distro they can use in their day jobs. What do you need as a sysadmin - a rock solid base. Debian moves slowly, is tested for over a year prior to release, backports security patches to stable instead of moving to a new version, has hundreds if not thousands of rules and tools to enforce quality standards, and discussions with its users (who are also the developers) that span weeks if not months over technical changes to ensure they don't break things. The flips side of this coin is you will see people complaining about how old Debian is, or how hard Debian packaging is. All true. And it's that way because it's the only way we've found to create the distro these sysadmin/system builders can build on and trust. It's not a coincidence Debian lead the world into reproducible builds.
In answer to your question "why do they do it", the answer is because we haven't found a better way. Ubuntu's constant introduction home grown features like MIR, their desktop, and the snap store are designed to benefit them, but it's users. Proprietary systems are out of the question now in many places - hidden code with hidden bugs controlled by hidden entities and state actors isn't we or many of our employers can tolerate. What other way is there? It seems to me that open source (which is what Debian is - an open source distro), it the only way to build these types of systems.
Well, this problem needs to be solved. Even if you get a tiny amount, that would inspire a lot of people. Having something in return helps a lot vs invisible hands patting on your shoulder. Most people are ungrateful and take this FOSS ecosystem granted.
My idea is to separate a 5 eur/usd from every EU/US citizen's monthly paycheck and allocate that money to the sites the user frequents, the foss tools used.