My point is that for people to start hiring you at a high hourly rate, there's got to be a burning demand, whereas with a product or app, the costs are much lower, so it's easy to spread them around.
> Certainly if you make something people want, people will pay you to develop it
Only after a certain critical mass, that is a lot higher than what it is for a proprietary project, where all sales feed back into the project. I mean, I certainly don't pay people to develop Linux, Postgres, Ruby, Rails, gcc or any of the other projects I use, although I do try and contribute back where possible.
BTW, strange but true story: I probably made the most money off of Hecl doing a BlackBerry port for... of all people, PASOK, the Greek center-left political party. This was all before the country ran out of money, and I did get paid.
It's not too hard... Open source coders are likely to write more open source software, so it's a good investment for the collectivity.
Certainly if you make something people want, people will pay you to develop it. I don't see a real problem with the model, though for obvious reasons the incentives are going to drive more people to startups than to new open source projects.