My speculative 2c:

Maybe from the developer side, it can be seen as something of a luxury - like, how nice that you can afford to spend coding time on projects that make no money. If you live in poverty, your time is better spent on jobs that get you income. I'm guessing they are grateful for FOSS being available, and don't have a negative perception of it, but perhaps there is a lot of talent out there who feels unable to spend time contributing to FOSS.

I think this applies if we take "low wage countries" as literally paying developers below the poverty line, which I think is far off base. Coders are still paid higher relative to the rest of the country, and certainly above the poverty line for most. Wouldn't make much sense as a career path otherwise considering the time to learn the job enough to do it.

Of course I'm generalising, but as someone in the 3rd world I'd only imagine this being different in literal code sweatshops.

My hypothesis is that Open Source Software (Linux, OpenOffice, etc.) is a great gift because there isn't enough money to buy commercial software. However, open source libraries can be seen as a problem because today you can't easily build and sell libraries as everybody expects and uses open-source libraries.

Today, you have to build a bigger useful library, start a company around it, advertise, and sell it as a product - which is a big monetary investment. Starting with a small useful library and slowly receiving some money could help developers to get more interested in developing libraries - especially when young or living in low-wage countries.