There are a lot of options to work for a company that builds free software now, and not necessarily fangs / gafam. Many of those companies are struggling to find people. And now, you can often even join remotely. It might be paid less but still very comfortable.

You mentioned exclusively, that's true that you might have to write custom, closed code for customers at many of those companies. But that's still better than exclusively working on non free software.

You can make a lot of money writing free software at whatever FAANG is called now. I mean sure the source is never distributed because the binaries aren’t either, but it does meet the definition.

When Stallman says "free as in free speech, not free beer", he means freedom to use software in any way you want including changing it. Not zero price.

Except this model is practically "zero price". Yes, you can sell GPL software, but on the customer side, buying such software cannot be justified economically, if all you got to do is to find somebody/some place that will provide this software to you free of charge and legally so. The only customers that would pay are ones that do it for moral purposes, at which point your business selling GPL software isn't a business anymore, but something that receives charitable donations.

All of the open source companies/people that come to mind are not selling libre software, they are all selling some kind of service - support contracts, managed hosting, etc - or they embraced some kind of freemium/"open core" model (so they are really selling non-free software), or they are funded by charitable donations and sometimes public grants, often by having some large non-free companies being sponsors (Linus Torvalds is paid this way for example, through sponsorship money from the who-is-who of the non-free corporate world distributed through the Linux Foundation).

Game engine is not what is paying the developpers rent, and Stallman has always explained that he didn't believed artforms should be made open source.

It doesn't sound complicated to me to understand that you can sell games whose code is open source but the 3d models, graphics, levels building and artwork aren't. Customer would still retain all free software liberties, be able to port the game to other platforms and the dev studios would still get paid.

Ardour has 10's of thousands of users, many of which get the software from their Linux distributions. Nevertheless, more than 6000 of these individuals choose to help fund the project to the tune of between $150k and $210k a year.

So yes, although your observations are not wrong, they do not apply universally.

> The only customers that would pay are ones that do it for moral purposes, at which point your business selling GPL software isn't a business anymore, but something that receives charitable donations.

> Nevertheless, more than 6000 of these individuals choose to help fund the project to the tune of between $150k and $210k a year.

How is this not covered by the posters comment about it not being a business but a charity if you rely on people paying more than they need to?

> How is this not covered by the posters comment about it not being a business but a charity if you rely on people paying more than they need to?

If that's your definition, then sure.

That's not my definition.

No I mean literally working on GPLed code which means writing Free Software. But, since those companies never distribute binaries, they never have to share the code under the terms of the GPL.