Some open source projects are quite profitable. Bitcoin for example is an open source project. There are also many people paid to work on open source. Projects

Some open source projects are quite profitable. Bitcoin for example is an open source project. There are also many people paid to work on open source. Projects like TypeScript or TensorFlow are good examples. It just doesn’t work well to first write an open source library, give it away for free, and then later try to make money from it.