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> another company and volunteers pay for maintenance

That is and has been a very good argument. One thing I do notice though is that, with the emergence of agentic automatic maintenance workflows, that same maintenance surface seems to start shrinking right now.

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An illusion, I suspect. All software needs maintenance, and someone driving it, even if they are prompting an agent.

Maybe in some cases. In my experience maintenance often comes with exploratory work, the kind of where one needs to invest time, not to think about how your own side should work but in dissecting how a dependency or a target platform works in order to identify specific quirks that come and go with the passage of versions. I have seen significant acceleration in these kinds of workloads. This doesn't mean it makes maintenance free like some claim. It just makes it about 70% less of a burden

How is this an illusion? Thousands of people work on React, Svelte, Vue, Chrome, Linux, etc. Most aren't paid

I was referring to the (potential) illusion of home grown agentic solutions being lower cost/effort over the long term.

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