Many open source projects - Linux, Firefox, LLVM, WebKit, etc. - have people paid to work on them. This can also be true for small projects as well, I am paid t

Many open source projects - Linux, Firefox, LLVM, WebKit, etc. - have people paid to work on them. This can also be true for small projects as well, I am paid to work on Emscripten for example. Basically, if an open source project is valuable to an entity with money - can be a corporation or a non-profit - then that entity may hire people to work on that open source project. Being open source, the project may not be directly profitable for whoever sponsors the work (the code itself is not being sold, might be support though), but indirect profits or non-monetary effects can be very significant and enough to make paid work make sense. (Of course this is just one kind of way to get paid to work on open source code.)