What you're saying is that someone who might enjoy gardening as a hobby should be able to make a living mowing other people's lawns for free. Which is, of course, as ridiculous as expecting to make a living on free software contributions.
We already have a perfectly good system for exchanging goods and services for money. Free software is not that system and that is fine. The issue comes from misunderstanding what that system is and how it compares to basic capitalism.
If my hobby is to bake cakes, there isn’t typically some corporation making money off my cakes.
That's still a perfectly valid hobby.
P.S. You give away your designs because everyone else does and you get this big collection of free cake designs to bake. That's worth more to you in your cake baking hobby than selling your designs and making it a business. Invariably someone comes along and sees all this huge body of cake designs and says "This collection is worth money, you should be rich" and completely misunderstands the whole situation.
> That's still a perfectly valid hobby.
Of course. There are many hobbies which can financially support you, but there are lots of hobbies that don’t. Most hobbyist sports for example wouldn’t make anybody any money, but that’s fine, you do it for yourself. But the point I was making in my previous comment is that corporations aren’t making profits off the back of your hobby either.
If you build some software, you can share that an infinite number of times.
That chair has value. Maybe you can sell it, but maybe you just wanted to make a really nice chair.
That software has value. Maybe you can sell it, but maybe you just wanted to make a really nice piece of software. But just because the software is infinitely copy-able doesn't make it worth infinite dollars.
That last point is really the only important one and it makes no difference, to me, as the developer. I just want to make cool software. It just so happens that software is infinitely copy-able and chairs are not. The production side is the same.
I’m just pointing out that in open-source-as-a-hobby its very common that large corporations, who may or may not give back to the community themselves, derive profits off of hobbyist work while this is less common with other hobbies. Even if it doesn’t financially hurt the hobbyist, it can be demoralising (although others love it, so to each their own, I suppose — that’s why we have different licenses)
Companies may use open source software but they don't directly or indirectly profit from it; they can only profit from the value they provide on top of it. Software that is free for everyone cannot be a distinguishing feature.
Contributing to open source software, even if used by for-profit entities, is increasing the total state-of-the-art for the entire industry. If you are demoralized by that then you probably want a job, not a hobby.
The other case is a project desperately needed by the community and every corporation is making their own internal version of that code. No one really wants to commit the next 10 years of their life to it but someone eventually does sensing the need. The author gets many stars and forks but almost no money. Corporations then want to twist the library to their own specific needs while an individual or small team build a necessary tool but there's no business model. Then either a corporation adopts the repo to keep it going or the author tries to turn it into a business. Both of these outcomes rarely succeed for the wider needed but no one's really willing to pay for it.
These are super broad generalizations. The big problem seems to be when some software is really needed, someone steps in to build it and then no one pays them. Need != business model.