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Working for a for-profit company is a completely different labor relationship than working for an OSS org or other non-profit. You absolutely should fight to prevent management from extracting more of the value you generated just because you cut your personal costs, but you may be able and willing to accept less income in order to contribute to an organization that you believe in that isn't profiting off your labor. One is adversarial theft, the other is the willing donation of your time to a cause.

> but you may be able and willing to accept less income in order to contribute to an organization that you believe in that isn't profiting off your labor.

But there are plenty of organizations profiting off of the dev’s labor. Why is it different just because those organizations are users and not their employer?

If babel was a commercial product it wouldn't have trouble getting enough funding to pay these salaries. 10000 users paying $100 would get you $1 million revenue.

Sure, but then you have a much larger hiring pool. Focusing on SV limits that pool and ups the price.