Everyone does open source work for different reasons, and I'm not sure if more money is always enough of a motivator. I have a handful of projects that you coul

Everyone does open source work for different reasons, and I'm not sure if more money is always enough of a motivator. I have a handful of projects that you couldn't pay me to provide commercial support for because I no longer have any interest in them. Working on boring projects for money is what full-time jobs are for (and most full-time eng jobs are much easier than maintaining a popular open source project). With that said, I could totally see how paid OSS work as the norm would be a catalyst to improving the status quo. It would certainly lead to more and better OSS projects. Even if the current OSS ecosystem doesn't like it, it will 100% lead to new projects and new devs pursuing the money. Maybe part of the solution is to form agencies which work with OSS devs to pursue contracts/sponsorships/donations from commercial users of their projects? The legal/business/sales part of the process is non-trivial. This makes me think of "content creators" on social media that make a ton of money producing free videos/streams. OSS devs are maybe like the B2B version of that? :P