It’s 11:43pm on a Monday night. My 6-week-old son is asleep in my office so my wife can get some uninterrupted rest for the first half of the night. He’s finally asleep now, and I probably should be also after a full day of work. But I’m not done for the day. Even though I’m a software engineer by trade, I’m also a computer programmer by hobby and passion. So I do what I’ve been doing for well over a decade now: I boot up my computer to write some code.
I would (and do) work on my own projects for free.
You can do that now. Nothing stops you from doing free work. Most people can’t afford to work for free.
I think there should be a clause in most open source projects that you’ll donate time if used for corporate interest. That way companies would be forced to contribute which means the employee is paid.
I’ve seen many companies just take from oss. They need to give back as well.
How many hours per week do you spend working on your own project for free?
How many bug reports and merge requests do you get per day?
I promise you that the way you work on your own project does not scale to the level of big FOSS projects with tens or hundreds of thousands of users or more.