> Most open source software is written by programmers who are full-time employed by companies which directly consume the software, at the explicit or implicit b

> Most open source software is written by programmers who are full-time employed by companies which directly consume the software, at the explicit or implicit blessing of their employers. It is not charity work, any more than they charitably file taxes. There are perhaps 1000 OSS projects that make up the software you use on a daily basis. Many of these have core developers or maintainers who are hired by a company to write or maintain that software for them to consume. But there are literally millions more open source projects, almost entirely developed by hobbyists. Github alone has 24 million developers, with 67 million repos (25 million of which are public), and 1.5 million organizations, in 200 countries. The top languages used there are JS, Python, Java, Ruby, PHP, C++, CSS, C#, Go, and C. (Github, btw, is not the only repository of open source code) Most open source software is most definitely not written by one kind of dev. But there _is_ an underlying motivator behind almost all open source: "I need this code." As long as there is someone who needs it passionately enough to take it upon themselves to craft and produce it, without regard to commercial gain, it will stay alive. Open Source is basically woodworking, and our computers are the chisels and saws.