That's a fantasy of the hobby FOSS developer.

"If I make something so great then people will still pay me even if I give it away for free!"

A tiny percentage of people might still pay for it, but the vast majority will not, and will complain loudly about any attempts to monetize.

Why does everything need to be made for profit? Why does someone NEED to be paid for every project, every scrap of work?

You said it yourself, this is a hobby FOSS developer. Key word hobby.

Have people stopped understanding that others do things simply because they want to? Not everything is profit-driven, even on this site.

I would like for artisan, indie developers to be able to sustain some kind of a living off their work instead of being forced to work at a soul-sucking faang optimizing ad clicks because their hobby projects can't pay any bills.

This is what I was referring to.

Though I can also understand the child comment on your comment as well. I think that is a reasonable statement as well.

This is a really weird ethical dilemma that I still hold, as a hobby creator myself (just not at a scale of really earning money,but boy I sure would want to ), I want to earn money from it but I also want to distribute it freely, I am not sure how I can get both.

> A tiny percentage of people might still pay for it, but the vast majority will not, and will complain loudly about any attempts to monetize.

This is true of all products though, in ecommerce 1% conversion is pretty average... generally the path is to increase the top of the funnel because it's always small at the bottom... some products get by with 0.5% or less