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Yeah, because the 'sell support/hosting' model has been such a failure /s You don't have to be in academia to afford to write F/OSS nor is it financially draining to do so.

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Is very easy to say that, if you already "rich".

That is not universal across all the developer community. Here, in Colombia, open source is something you do on the sidelines.

Pretend you can live of it? That is non-sense.

It's not that hard to make a living, if you write custom software instead of selling products. The niche I'm aware is development of modules for Odoo (a kind of SAP alternative); I've worked for such a small bootstrapped company for years, and 90% of what we wrote was A/LGPL licensed. Most clients don't care if you release useful generic parts of the code as OSS modules, nor if you use such modules from other developers.

I know companies following this model all over the world: Spain, Brazil, India, Argentina, Venezuela, etc.

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