What a peculiar comment on this article in particular. The author mentions right in the article that they run several open source project as a business venture,

What a peculiar comment on this article in particular. The author mentions right in the article that they run several open source project as a business venture, placing them squarely in the entrepreneuring class. It's just that libjpeg-turbo doesn't seem to be very successful from a monetization standpoint. > It's very unfortunate that software engineers, especially the good ones able to create libraries used by pretty much everyone, seem to lack the drive to monetize their work It seems quite obvious to me that most open source libraries are used by pretty much everyone because they are free to use. Personal projects rapidly become unfeasibly expensive if you need to pay even just a few bucks for 30-50 dependencies each, and businesses have procurement procedures around purchases that tremendously inflate the real cost of purchasing something. "Free" is the only price at which such friction is avoided, and so is the only price at which software spreads to large amounts of users.