The only thing "cool about a company is that they deposit money into my account every two weeks. I don't look for "cool" jobs.

Do you like your work boring?

After developing professionally for over 20 years and as a hobbyist for 10 years before that, there is nothing "exciting" about software development. I don't hate my job or my career by any means, but at the end of the day, it just funds my lifestyle.

That's fine, but plenty of us choose to work on systems we find intrinsically interesting and/or on problems we consider important. Sometimes that comes with a financial penalty. Personally, I'm happy to get slightly less money in exchange for more interesting and meaningful work.

The cost is something too. I enjoy developing in the Microsoft environment, but by using Microsoft you actually have to pay for your tools.

Like in other professions! What a strange thing!

I enjoy being paid to develop software, so I also want the producers of my tools to be able to pay for their bills.

I wonder how may that use FOSS on their business actually pay/donate anything, even a penny, to the developers.

My experience consulting says pretty much no one.

When I started work engineers has $10k RISC workstations and $50k/year in software licences, we did external training regularly. We were expensive, and mgmt were loathe to waste our time on crud because of that, and because we delivered. Now they talk about cloud synergies and ITIL processes and outsourcing and tech partnerships -- tech costs WAY MORE but devs/engineers aren't seen as delivering value. No one pays anything for the open source that makes it all work. It's enough to make you want to run away and join a startup.