Why you should become an open source sustainer

FWIW I maintain multiple open source projects and a free CDN service for developers that use Bootstrap & Font Awesome. To me, a contribution is not limited to code and never should be. If it makes the FOSS community thrive, then that is a contribution.

If you've never lived on freenode or one of the other support networks the community that develops open source is often very remote from the people that end up 'supporting' it. People sharing expertise is why databases like MySQL and Postgres win for all sorts of people, and there are many ways to provide this support that has nothing to do with contributing code.

A great example is melpa and marmalade for emacs. The difference between having a package manager and not having a package manager has transformed the open source project but all they are doing is mirroring a bunch of elisp.

Sometimes just providing the infrastructure to make a project available is the only reason why the project is popular. npm anyone?

There's a reason most companies have more than just engineers though.

Major projects has corporate sponsors or academic sponsors. A lot of open source is done and paid for by companies. For that matter, even free for open source hosting services have bills that needs to be paid - by companies (github, google).

Linux Torwalds and linux maintenners are paid - which is a good thing btwm

I agree. That said there are many corporations that do contribute money, developer time, infrastructure, legal, etc. But not enough IMO.