Which may explain why people can feel entitled to getting paid for their efforts; we tend to feel that if we give something to others they owe us something back (this is why we have a bunch of laws against giving and accepting gifts in certain situations, because of the societal pressure to make it an equitable exchange), and it sometimes takes intentional reminding of ourselves that that's not how giving works, and that there is no actual quid pro quo obligation.

Whether you offer paid support or not has no bearing on whether you release your code under an open source license.

Many companies offer support contracts for their open source software. Many paid employees work on open source software, not only volunteers (Google, Facebook, Canonical, Red Hat, SchedMD and so on).

Open source and commercial are not antonyms.

I'm saying when something is open sourced, -the work is done-. You are not necessarily volunteering to work any more. The act of open sourcing something involves no volunteering; it involves giving something away. Likewise any patches you choose to release.

When I say 'support', I mean "Oh, this person filed a bug; I'll go fix it". I was not saying support with an implication of financial remuneration.

Open sourcing something is also not equal to distributing something for free. I'm sorry for nitpicking, but there's a lot of genuine confusion about this out there.

You can release something with an open source license without distributing it yourself.

The free software movement regards it as a moral imperative to license all software with free / open source licenses, even if you just give the software to your client and never upload it to Github or release it publicly online.

Even if you distribute it, you don't even have to have a bug tracking interface.

Open sourcing is simply attaching a free/open source license to a piece of software. Nothing more nothing less. Not participation in the community, not Github, not issue tracking, not upstream or downstream patch contributions, or volunteering or zero-price distribution or anything else.

And your point...is identical to the one I was making, that licensing something as open source is not volunteering to do anything from here on out, but instead just giving away the work you've already done.

You're nit picking where there are no nits.

That's basically what NGOs are...

Seems like fair trade

You can (and many companies do) make money with (i.e. commercialize) open source software.

thank you for the opportunity to clarify...

YOU - an individual coder; OpenSource - a publication with license for others; Write Code - specialized skills with high literacy; Volunteering - social arrangement with time and resources.

You - Write Code - OpenSource => volunteering

when code is made OpenSource, the origins of the code over time are due to more than one person

when code is made OpenSource, benefits are primarily to systems, less so to the individual

to understand the decision to make OpenSource code, the systems that benefit extend to Five Areas (for example, to quote https://paulfuhlir.com/ ) .. listed above

does that make it clearer ?

And how would you pay the 'employed' programmers that created the software if not by charging for the software

Tons of open source software is being created by professional employees of companies today. It's not some hypothetical, this is today's reality.

And it's mostly about profiting from related services, paid support, training, consulting etc.

I realize it cannot work the same way for some minor app by a tiny company and it does create wrong incentives sometimes (you need to make things just complicated enough so they need to hire you for support and training, but not so complicated that it's unusable).

(By the way, nothing forbids you from charging for the software, source or binaries, even if you license it under a free software / open source license. "Free" is a catastrophic naming choice, as it doesn't refer to zero price. It is true, though, that anyone who buys it once can then redistribute the software for zero price, so you'd only get money from people who buy directly from you, instead of obtaining a copy at zero cost from somewhere else.)

But you cannot cry and moan if you give away the soup for free to someone and then find that they are reselling that to someone else for money. Or to make it more apt, I can ask a Softbank for money to build an unlimited soup dispenser and then let others take soup from it for free. But I cannot stop the people that took the free soup I offered to give away/sell it to others

Actually I think charities get really pissed off when you try do this? Isn't this why the individual packets of stuff often say 'not for resale' or whatever?

Compare a box a granola bars from Costco vs the same bar from a grocery store.