People pay for things all the time, why not (almost surely unnecessary) code? Why do you all feel entitled to free access to thousands of hours of very highly skilled devs' efforts (most of which they actually are giving away for free)?

Moreover, it is quite common for there to be pro versions of libraries these days - tailwind, all sorts of component libraries, etc..

> Plenty of other open source projects make money without attracting this kind of negative feedback

We dont seem to be living in the same reality. In mine, maintaining open source projects is a nearly-completely thankless, profit-less endeavour. It is a rare exception that someone can earn a living from it. And datastar's devs have zero expectation that they'll do so, even with this model - hence it is registered as a 501c3, and the funds will cover things like travelling to conferences to talk about it.