> People need to make money somehow. Developers who spend years creating, maintaining, and continually improving an open source database (or other project) used by millions deserve compensation.
Look at the list of contributors to Postgres that I linked to. The vast majority of them are employed to work on Postgres, some by big tech companies, others by smaller managed hosting providers and consultancies.
That is a sustainable funding model for an open source database project. What isn't sustainable is building a business around the idea that only your company will ever profit off of (and thereby fund) the FOSS project. The whole point of FOSS is that both the work and the gains are shared with the whole community.
Look at the list of contributors to Postgres that I linked to. The vast majority of them are employed to work on Postgres, some by big tech companies, others by smaller managed hosting providers and consultancies.
That is a sustainable funding model for an open source database project. What isn't sustainable is building a business around the idea that only your company will ever profit off of (and thereby fund) the FOSS project. The whole point of FOSS is that both the work and the gains are shared with the whole community.