> Additionally, I would work on a cloud service using both those projects which at some point would become a business.
> Now this was a good plan. The money from GitHub sponsors which I had previously been donating to charity would take the sting out of not having an income for a while. While far from a salary (where I live), at around $1000 a month it would help pay a few bills.
> I have far more confidence in that vision now that I have raised seed funding. Predicated on that cloud service, I have enough funding to hire a few developers to work on it with me. Last month I was an unemployed code monkey, today I am a Founder / CEO of Textualize. Go figure.
Good find! Getting seed funding to try and monetize a bunch of MIT libraries using a "cloud service". Wild. Wonder if OP was always 100% dedicated to FOSS for 503 days or if they worked on the "cloud service"...
Contributing to OSS is a hobby, not a job. You explicitly work for free on purpose. Whether or not you’re able to pay your bills is unrelated to the OSS contribution, it’s very clear that you’re not going to get paid for writing code that you’re giving away for free.
An example of one person being employed and contributing to open source as part of his job is not a refutation of the statement. You don’t have to read anything to know that, just use logic.
To provide a counter-example you’d need to reference an open-source project that makes money selling the source code which, hopefully obviously, doesn’t exist, by definition
