They mean "free" as in freedom not free beer.
You’re probably using a corporate free software browser right now?
The idea that free software is a niche done by amateurs is wrong. Most people who work on Linux are paid to do so. Same for Chrome, same for Java, same for LLVM, etc etc all the way up the stack.
Free software won, and we have the corporations who funded it to thank.
If the majority were paid, GIMP would be on par with Photoshop, Inkscape with Illustrator, etc. But they’re not on par because they don’t have corporations throwing millions of dollars at them like Adobe does.
It’s just not the case that most projects are just random hobbies these days, and it’s bad for the movement to keep pretending it is. It’s grown up and corporations invested - that’s a good thing!
I guess we’re just arguing past each other. I agree it’s good to recognize money in the industry (many have an aversion to it because of EEE fears), and I also agree that the majority of successful projects are done by paid people. I guess that’s the disconnect: I’m looking at all projects, not just the successful ones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
Taking money does not lead to EEE unless you're taking it for the explicit purpose of making incompatible software. (A person with anti-competitive attitudes doesn't actually need to take money to do this, but it probably helps) The aversion to money is likely coming from somewhere else.
Money thrown by corporations is what separates successful projects, like Linux, or Apache Spark, or Postgres from niche things that no one knows or care about.
Another common scenario is big corpo developing software for internal use, and then open sourcing it, so that volunteers can do maintenance (e.g. Kubernetes)
* Niche done by amateurs * Corporate funded development * People not being paid to work on free software but contributing to free software because it benefits the company they work for.
I fall into the third camp. The company I work for would never send me to FOSDEM and don't pay me to work on OSS but they recognise that me doing so benefits them.
This was a schism back in the 90s and open source won out in the long term and free software philosophy is still niche.
Again, this does not "matter" in practice for developers day-to-day as the actual software labeled as open source or free software is essentially the same set of software and same set of licenses (with differences only relevant for nitpickers).
But the whole free software movement is a strongly political and ethically motivated one, considering proprietary software an injustice, power abuse, immoral. Not just a worse model of cooperation or engineering practice. And as I wrote elsewhere in the thread, most devs have no idea about this fact, not to mention having a stance or opinion on it.