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)