‘Open Source’ has no implications about whether the writer gets paid or not, but I’ll set aside this semantic criticism. There are many many FOSS projects wher

‘Open Source’ has no implications about whether the writer gets paid or not, but I’ll set aside this semantic criticism. There are many many FOSS projects where contributors get paid a great deal of money. Universities sponsor contributors. And most contributions to a project like say Kubernetes come from Google’s employees. Government agency grants. Et cetera. But if that’s not enough, tech giants throw a lot of money at places like the Linux Foundation to ensure that FOSS projects get maintained (and thus the maintainers get compensated). The fact is that a little ‘buy me coffee’ link is simply an ineffective way to monetize a FOSS project. But FOSS is not broken. Some of the greatest things in computing today are FOSS.