This is a reality that exists in any limited market. Tools like nginx and mysql count their for-profit users in the in the millions. This means that there are

This is a reality that exists in any limited market. Tools like nginx and mysql count their for-profit users in the in the millions. This means that there are tremendous opportunities for supporting development. By this I mean, companies and entities who use the FOSS products to support of their for-profit business in other domains, not directly profiting from the FOSS. FOSS development isn't cost-less. And so the business equation is always present. The degree to which purely academic support for open source can make progress is asymptotic. People need to eat, pay rent, have a life, which means someone has to pay for something. It might not be directly related to the FOSS tool, but people have to have income in order to contribute to these efforts. It is easy to show that something like Linux is likely the most expensive piece of software ever developed. This isn't to say the effort was not worth it. It's just to point out it wasn't free, it has a finite cost that is likely massive. An industry such as chip design is microscopic in size in terms of the number of seats of software used around the world. I don't have a number to offer, but I would not be surprised if the user based was ten million times smaller than, say, the mysql developer population (if not a hundred million). This means that nobody is going to be able to develop free tools without either massive altruistic corporate backing for a set of massive, complex, multi-year projects. If a company like Apple decided to invest a billion dollars to develop FOSS chip design tools and give them away, sure, it could happen. otherwise, not likely.