Have you seen the Magit kickstarter[1]?

Magit is one of Emacs' killer apps and it's known and loved by virtually all of its users, who are almost all developers..

When its maintainer opened a kickstarter to work on it for a year, it was more than fully funded by nearly 2000 backers.

So, yes, developers are willing to pay for quality software.

But, yeah, overall this is a gift economy where people take what's freely given but also give back to the community in some way.

[1] - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1681258897/its-magit-th...

If you are one of the fortunate few who can thread that needle, congratulations, for you too can now revel in the financial security that only a moderately popular kickstarter can bring. Don’t spend it all in one place.

I feel that we are in a position where we can estimate the amount of work and the dedication that a team has put into a great product. I have paid for many of the great softwares that run on my machine because of this knowledge.

I do think there is a significant segment of developers who are really gung-ho about free software politics and refuse on moral grounds to pay for software ever. So that might be what you're seeing.

I don't think this is true. There are lots of things that developers throw money at, and each developer can easily think of multiple processes that would happily through hundreds or thousands of dollars at if those processes could be automated.

However, it is hard to build software that developers will pay for.

I.e., the demand is there and it is strong, but the products that meet that demand are generally Real Engineering Problems.

A) Self-funding a startup has required me to become quite frugal

B) Giving money to competitors is almost always a mistake

Unfortunately that's the way things go. I would like to be able to afford more, but so would everyone else.