> From everything I've heard it kinda does. If you're writing something valuable then maybe a company will employ you to keep working on it, and the portfolio c

> From everything I've heard it kinda does. If you're writing something valuable then maybe a company will employ you to keep working on it, and the portfolio can certainly help in interviews (to write other software), but getting non-negligible compensation for the use of the software itself is rare. Even those projects that are well funded, like the Linux kernel, are done so not out of goodness of heart, but due to companies realizing it's in their rational interest to have a common standard base of sorts. Successfully creating a permissive open source project expecting it to be magically funded by benevolent parties is just exceedingly rare. Usually the funding starts first, or effort proceeds in lock-step with funding. There's a bit of a cart-and-horse here though. Non-permissive licenses like AGPL are often not the result of a single author hoping they might be able to negotiate some licensing deal in the future - it is the result of a commercial enterprise trying to be restrictive in the ability for people to use their source without compensating them. Same with what is normally considered a more open license, than AGPL, the GPL - where MySQL was reported as going after others for using independent database drivers without buying a commercial license, saying use of the MySQL network protocol made the application using the driver a "derivative work" under the GPL. Linux is a special case because there are a large number of commercial entities which realize contributing to Linux is way cheaper and faster than writing their own kernel and porting user land software to it. Apache HTTPD, on the other hand, is an example of an application where corporations DID find the motivation to write their own alternative funded with a commercial model, such as NGINX.