A young friend once asked me why I spend so much time on open source instead of selling that time and getting rich.
Sure. I could get rich.
There are plenty of easy ways to do that, most of them morally bankrupt.
Long before crypto bros turned scarcity into JPEGs, I built www.bloodxp.com: a system where value couldn't be bought, only earned through saving lives.
The concept never took off, because the people i hired then, never believed mission, then they became big crypto scammers once NFTs showed up (They had the experience of playing with jpeg).
The consumer never took me seriously because they didn't like 'dragons'.
The decentralized protocol i prototyped then, is still better than the one used by this Platform i'm posting in.
You dont do open source for money. You do it for legacy.
And most of the time you even pay for it. That's the cost of building things that outlive you.
Being rich without outcome, is like playing in God Mode.. You get dopamine for few hours then you became bland, you have no boundaries or limitations.
OSS force you to have them.