Nothing is truly free. All developer time is bought and paid for. Even leisure time. What pays for the software developer to be able to not starve and be able t

Nothing is truly free. All developer time is bought and paid for. Even leisure time. What pays for the software developer to be able to not starve and be able to spend leisure time on free software? Paid software. Obviously. Somewhere in the equation someone needs to be paid. Usually if software is open source, it won't be paid for. So whatever is funding it... well if it's a software company funding open source software where does the money come from? Obviously paid software. And people won't pay for open source software because it's basically free. Follow the money trail it ends at roughly three places: 1. donations, 2. tech support 3. ads 4. closed source software. 1 and 2 are too miniscule to be effective.