> That's the point, they don't pay, and they don't get support. But they still complain You've put your finger on the core of the issue with FiloSottile's sugg

> That's the point, they don't pay, and they don't get support. But they still complain You've put your finger on the core of the issue with FiloSottile's suggestion. The problem is that to sell something to a big corporation, you need to have something tangible you can sell. What you have are enormous pieces of widely used software, being given away for free. Many companies are going to take that and run with it, and forgo a support contract entirely. You may argue that they want support when there's an issue, but the truth is they're happy enough with the status quo and just complaining a lot. In FiloSottile's model, a corporation needs to use your software for something specific, but also expects to need changes to it or prioritized issue support and approaches you; you send them an invoice with five zeroes on it as a bill for your services and they are heavily incentivized to pay for it. Unfortunately that's not the reality for 99.9% of open source maintainers, a figure that includes most creators of popular software like VLC. I've personally contributed to a bunch of projects and maintain some of my own, but it's a hobby. As far as I know no corporations are even using any of them. Figuring out some software niche that no one yet has a product it, building it, and waiting for a corporation to swoop in and drop me a six figure yearly check cannot be a career strategy.