Sounds like survivorship bias. The people who are able to start and keep working on open source projects have other income sources, because the current donation model affords them below-poverty wages.
I would like open source to be a viable model for projects run without maintainers needing to be independently wealthy or full time employed elsewhere. This article is pouting out that we’re a long ways off.
There is definitely survivor bias, you're completely right.
At the same time, I know for a fact that if I had my name at the top of the list of a well known open source project, I could tack an extra 50k/year to how much I ask for my next job.
The same holds true for conference speakers. People will say how much work it is and how you're usually not paid for it... But last time I talked at a conference my inbox exploded with people wanting to give me the moon and then some.
Millage varies and there are many other factors at play for sure, but there is a lot to gain by doing this stuff. There's a reason that so many people try to be the next Webpack, the next big test runner, the next big site generator, etc.
> I would like open source to be a viable model for projects run without maintainers needing to be independently wealthy or full time employed elsewhere. This article is pouting out that we’re a long ways off.
Why? There's no guarantee that's going to result in better software anyway. Sounds like a desire to just be able to work on absolutely whatever you want and get paid (very well) for it.
>I would like open source to be a viable model for projects run without maintainers needing to be independently wealthy or full time employed elsewhere. This article is pouting out that we’re a long ways off.
You can somewhat get there by purchasing the source code to closed-source products and then open-sourcing it.
I would like open source to be a viable model for projects run without maintainers needing to be independently wealthy or full time employed elsewhere. This article is pouting out that we’re a long ways off.