It's ironic isn't it? On one hand we lament the plight of the OSS developer getting a pithy amount of donations relative to their value added, on the other hand if someone dare try to charge for their work, out come the pitchforks.
Yeah, it is the only profession where a group of people expect to be paid while actively refusing to pay for the work of others, that actually make their own work possible in first place.
I'm fine with charging for your work, but I have a very high bar for the value you create if I am putting man-years of effort behind building on your ecosystem.
Yup and that’s the thing, is that programming languages require a lot of work, more than anyone is willing to fund (these days most accurately measured in man-decades). Except corporations and sometimes VCs, and that’s why we most of us use the same handful of mostly identical (in the space of PLs they are all in the same corner) corporate-sponsored programming languages.
The thing is though, it used to be the norm to pay for software. At some point, I think with the rise of "free" social network platforms that gave you tons of features, people then began expect high quality software for free (obviously not realizing they are the product).