Relatedly: Studies show that paying people zero money and giving them respect gets better results than paying some pittance well below market rate. The study conclusion was to the effect of "Pay enough (market rates) or pay nothing. Don't pay some pittance because it is all your project can afford."
When it was a freeware product, several people wanted to donate but we never accepted any donation, just to avoid the feeling of getting paid too low. Also I guess we were a bit equalitarian: we wanted that either nobody paid or that everybody paid.
But, this is something my internal dialogue says whenever I hear a musician talking about money (and where there share is...) - 'But you are in it for the music, right?'
This musicians seem to forget, they become businessmen and think the value is in the magic of their work and they should be paid for it. I wish they kept music as a fun thing rather than something they 'only do if paid' and for them to see hiring venues and doing tours and selling merchandise as what they need to do for money.
So, analogy is different to reality, however, we must remember why we do stuff for Open Source. Instead of looking for T-shirts and venue tickets to sell, we need to have real world needs for the Open Source code, to work on those problems and get paid for them using and contributing as required to the FOSS projects. As for expectation for pay from the FOSS project (rather than the day job) it should be 'you're in it for the love of music, right?'
Software authors should also be paid. I'm just pointing out that there are some practical problems with it in the open source setting.
My ideal would be that essentially all software is open source, but everyone would also get paid. But I realize there are many reasons why we don't have that situation today.
Sometimes, the answers aren't as simple and easy as we wish they were.
The problem is getting to that level where you have so many fans that you can fill an arena or even a smaller venue.
I'm almost positive this isn't true. If you restrict to the top few percent of projects, it'll be much more true, but even so I think you'll find a lot of projects with relatively small core groups, and sometimes a single hacker who wrote most of the core.
Weekend project: try to quantify this via GitHub APIs? Although suspect that might still give a somewhat skewed picture (not every major project is on GitHub...)
Think of every open source OS, browser, compiler, interpreter, etc.
There might be one person who initiated the project and did much of the design, like Guido van Rossum for Python, but it wouldn't be fair if he got 100% of the compensation and everybody else on python-dev got 0%.
So suppose you actually manage get paid despite all that -- how do you distribute money fairly? This is a huge problem can could actually slow the project down by leading to hurt feelings. Ironically, it's almost better for the group if nobody gets paid.
Corporations have evolved all sorts of imperfect systems to solve this problem, but it comes at a tremendous cost (performance reviews, interviews, firing, all of HR essentially).
But the open source model of collaboration follows the principle of "least bureaucracy". It throws out all these "coordination costs" in the name of just getting the job done. No more and no less.