What I saying is the answer to "How do you become financially independent by developing your own proprietary software project?" is "Short answer --- in most cas

What I saying is the answer to "How do you become financially independent by developing your own proprietary software project?" is "Short answer --- in most cases you don't." Therefore, your earlier comment was incomplete, as your short answer was also true for non-open source. I 100% agree with you that open source software development is not a good way to maximize profit. I do not recommend it as a way to develop products. I recommend it mostly for 1) people with external funding, as with research grant funding, or 2) for projects funded by in-house cost reduction (your "open source devalues the work of software development", but with the qualifier that all reusable software projects devalue the work of software development, not just open source ones.) Which is why in my comment I pointed out one of the (many) factors which make open source software projects harder to monetize that proprietary - the difficulty of adjusting price to reflect market segmentation. I believe that bringing up structural examples like this are more relevant than pointing to, say, D. Richard Hipp as an example of someone making a good living primarily developing open source projects, or your personal anecdotes of how you and (a handful of?) some people you know profited well from proprietary software projects.