Ah sorry! I absolutely did not mean this to disparage Evan. I think very highly of him and love Vue. So in that case, my example may not fit my point, which is that it's hard to become a personality (and/or brand) that is known well enough to support a full time income.

One might say that other open-source projects don't make a significant income because they don't have value, but I think you only need to look at e.g. the npm download stats for many packages to see that this isn't true.

Put another way, _many_ software libraries enable huge amounts of business value that is not captured by the authors of those libraries.

For instance, if you're a JS dev, you've probably used lodash or moment, but maybe can't even name who the authors are of those projects.