@amiloradovsky@functional.cafe I don't think there is no place for money in foss, it just requires something that nobody really wants.

The open source projects today can get away with what you describe only because they compete in markets defined by, and adhere to standards(usually none) set by proprietary software culture/industry. People involved acquired their experience, habits, belief, expectations etc. in that environment. One of the crucial things the established industry lacks IMO is a proper infrastructure. Most programmers should not serve one or the other international megacorp, they should serve the general public directly, through local small businesses providing installation, configuration, maintanace. They should not aspire to the next great breakthrough in the field, but to simply serve their immediate neighbors well. Many engineering industries have this, the difference is that software engineering can only have this, and this must become the main revenue source. There is no real production or distribution. What is called production is just R&D (which should be funded by those relatively small businesses not in any way marketed to the general public), and distribution is only hard when you try to exert total centralized control over it.

I think the hard pill to swallow is that without the proprietary software culture, you and I would have a job and a salary akin to an average plumber. So for any of it to work we must set aside our aspirations and figure out how to do just that, figure out how to get our immediate neighbors to pay us to install, configure and maintain software for them. Takes an entirely different set of skills than what we trained for and studied, but that's where we're at, it's the wild west and we've yet to establish the first infrastructures.