I'm a maintainer for an Apache project. My company pays me to maintain the project because we use it internally. If they did not pay me to maintain it, I would not be doing it. I imagine I'm in a similar spot as many other open source maintainers.

One thing to consider though is that all the big companies like Google and Facebook and many others have dedicated employees on their payroll whose primary responsibility is contributing to open source projects and the more critical a piece of open source software is, the more likely it is that there are contributors being paid by very large corporations to push the project in the right direction for them.

Expenses like paying their employees.

I will never understand how so many people in tech think that not for profit means never make a profit, or pay anyone for their time. But somehow spending money on corporate funded machinery is fine.

When a local maker space wasted thousands of dollars for a license of some cam software, but didn't want to pay a member $10 for cleaning up after everyone else (and keep them from being homeless) I had to seriously reconsider supporting a place that was so anti-people and pro corporation.

> I will never understand how so many people in tech think that not for profit means never make a profit, or pay anyone for their time.

My dad used to be a test engineer for UL, and the way he always (wryly) put it was: “They might not be for profit, but they’re definitely for making money.”

@antt, no they don't pay the employess. In fact they don't have employees: "With no employees and 2663 volunteers, it spent $270,846 on infrastructure, $92,364 on public relations, and $17,891 on two ApacheCons." - from wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apache_Software_Foundation

ps: I'm getting downvoted for linking facts :D

@rdelval cool, but that's totally different form Apache (the foundation) paying you. I think that's a really nice thing to do and have nothing against it.

My main point was simply that the history of open-source, as you can tell by all the amazing open-source released over the last decades by Apache itself, point to the fact that people created something of extreme high-quality without any direct economical reward.

And my point is that behind what you think is an altruistic contribution to open source, there is almost always a company with an economic incentive funding the engineer working on the project.