I mean lets be real here, if you competent enough to contribute into linux kernel then you basically competent enough to get a job everywhere

Yeah, that's why I said maybe I'm misunderstanding OP. If that's what OP meant by "monetization" then sure, monetization is great.

Companies pay their employees to work on Linux because it's valuable to them. Intel wants their hardware well supported. Facebook wants their servers running fast. It's an ecosystem built around free-as-in-freedom software, where a lot of people get paid to make the software better, and everyone can use it for free-as-in-beer

Compare that to the "open core" model where a company generally offers a limited gratis version of their product, but is really organized to funnel leads into their paid offering.

The latter is fine, but I don't really consider it some kind of charity or public service. It's just a company that's decided on a very radical marketing strategy.

You would be incorrect, LWN tracks statistics about contributor employers for every Linux kernel release and their latest post about that says that "(None)" (ie unpaid contributions) beat a number of large companies, including RedHat by the lines changed metric, or SUSE by the changesets metric.

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1046966/f957408bbdd4d388/

Well yes, but the vast majority of changes (~95%, by either changes or lines) seem to be from contributors supported by employers.

Sure, but there is still "someone" contributing unpaid.

Definitely individual can start with their own reason. It is questionable whether they can make contributions which scope would be a quarter of the work including design or even larger.

Other than a few popular libraries, I'm unaware of any major open source project that isn't primarily supported by corporate employees working on it as part of their day job.

Ghostty's obviously not a replicatable model, but it would be cool if it was!

What counts as a "major" open source project?