https://www.fordfoundation.org/work/learning/research-report...
I've been a product management lead for 2 commercial open-core companies and people drastically overestimate:
- How much code the community contributes (in both cases, >95% of all code was written by employees hired by the commercial company) - How few commercial resources are needed to support the community (running forums, answering GitHub tickets, etc) - How much financial support is actually forthcoming when there's not some "locked commercial features"
As the paper points out, many of these widely used commercial projects receive a few hundred thousand dollars at most in donations (often much less) but need to employ more developers than that financing can support to maintain a baseline capability to address basic bug fixes (including security fixes) once they become "popular enough" to be known by the masses.
Immediately think of Arrested Development: "It’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?"
Meanwhile, I would consider doing actual work for software projects that were just a couple people and a mission.
For those that are pressed for time, there is a good Executive Summary on page 8 of the linked PDF report:
https://www.fordfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/ro...