> 1. There are business that maintain open source software, today. That are paid maintenance. This can work for some cases. This can even work for libraries as some already do this.

This is true, but in my experience they end up complaining about the same thing. Competitors using their code to make money. Often this results in them becoming non-open-source, for example, Elasticsearch. I personally think the approach that Elastic has taken is the right approach and is what we should embrace instead of the whole open source is great and we should all do open source to help our careers.

> 4. There is a lot of open source maintained by companies that is not their core business value. This is reliable and production ready software. Sometimes people do make change requests to fix or improve these.

These are also often under-maintained.

> 3. Open source software can be great. But, just like an electrician doesn't just do electrical work in order to make a living... the same applies to open source software development.

I highly suspect the majority of them only do electrical work to make a living.

> Often this results in them becoming non-open-source, for example, Elasticsearch.

It's important to note that Elastic was a VC funded company that is now a listed public company trying to make open source maintainership their businesses as a high growth business. This is different from being a sustained maintainer making OK to decent compensation for their work.

The type of business matters. Is it high growth (or VC which is high growth) or is it consistent maintaining.

> These are also often under-maintained.

Sometimes they are and sometimes they are not. Are there any stats on this?

> I highly suspect the majority of them only do electrical work to make a living.

My point is that they don't ONLY DO electrical work. They have legal businesses, they do invoices, they handle accounting and money comes and goes, etc. They don't get to forget how businesses and finances happen while hoping for donations.

We should all embrace proprietary software? The approach Elasticsearch and other SaaS providers take is anti-freedom and inherently harmful to the "right to fork", which is precisely what makes open source more long-term sustainable and resilient than any garden-variety proprietary package.

Linux still has volunteers working on it, for 5.16 volunteers beat RedHat both by lines changed and changeset counts. Probably some of the (Unknown) people are also volunteers.

https://lwn.net/Articles/880699/

Keep in mind that a lot of Red Hat employees use their personal email addresses when committing to the kernel. It has always been allowed (though not necessarily encouraged), and many developers were involved in those communities before (or plan to be after) working at Red Hat, so they use their own email for continuity sake.

Especially if contributing to the kernel is something they only do infrequently rather than as part of their day job.

I believe that the LWN folks take that sort of situation into account, they don't just use the email address domain as an indicator of employer. And of course RedHat people probably do some Linux kernel work outside of paid time if they have pet issues unrelated to their RedHat directed time.