1. Premium support channels - This is basically how RedHat and Canonical make their money, while offering FOSS for individuals.

2. Donations - KDE and GNOME are largely donor-backed, both by individuals and corporate entities.

3. Commissions on features - Collabora for example is commissioned by Valve to improve KDE and SteamOS.

4. Software licenses - Certain FOSS licenses may permit paid access to software as long as the source is open i think? There are also source-available eg. Asperite that are open source, but only offer binaries for customers.

5. Add on services - Your FOSS web app can offer paid hosting and management for clients. Your distro can offer ISOs with extra pre-downloaded software for a fee (Zorin). You can partner with hardware to distribute your software (Manjaro, KDE).

6. Hired by a company to work on your project and integrate with their own stack. This is what Linus Torvalds did with Linux when he was first hired by Transmeta - part of his time was spent working on Linux to work better with the technology Transmeta used.

Universal basic income

Personally I like the following two approaches:

1. Free and open source for selfhosting, paid when hosted by the company (e.g Nextcloud, gitea, cal.com)

2. Free and open source with basic features, paid for proprietary business addons (e.g Portmaster, Xpipe)

I think those approaches are fully compatible with the open source definition, but please correct me if I am wrong. (The examples I mentioned are just some of which I personally know and use, but of course they are many others)

My partner is on SSDI for disability. If she works, she will lose her SSDI income, but she's allowed to generate income that isn't work/labor.

She is exploring FOSS as a career path because she could accept donations and that wouldn't impact her SSDI. She understands donations would be minimal, but she's hoping it's a way for her to break into the FOSS scene.

WARNING. Everything other than the last paragraph is kind of rude and opinionated, so skip to the bottom if you only want practical advice and not a philosophical rant.

First of all Free Software don't need paid developers. We scruffy hackers create software because it's fun. I have a strong suspicion that the commercialization of Free Software via the businessfriendly clothing "Open Source" is actually creating a lot of shitty software or at least a lot of good software that'll be obsoleted to keep business going. Capitalization of Free Software doesn't have an incentive to create good finished software, quite the opposite. The best open source software from commercial entities is in my opinion those that were open sourced when a product was no longer profitable as a proprietary business. As examples I love the ID software game engines and Blender. Others seem happy that Sun dumped the source code of Star Office, which then became OpenOffice and LibreOffice, but then again companies like Collabora are trying to turn it into a shitty webification instead of implementing real collaborative features into the software like what AbiWord has.

..and back in the real world where you need to buy food. Open Source consultancy, implementation of custom out-of-tree features, support, courses and training, EOL maintainance or products that leaverage Open Source software is my best answer. See Free Software as a commons we all contribute to, so that we can do things with it and built things from it. You should not expect people to pay for Free Software, but you can sell things that take advantage of Free Software as a resource.

Three examples of open source software where at least one developer could give up their regular job and work full-time on the open source project. I'm sure there's more (The Linux kernel maybe ?) :

• Mastodon
• Lichess
• SerenityOS

In both cases possible because of people donating. The last example is quite remarkable given the personal history of the developer and the fact that it was "just" a fun project with the developer sharing videos about programming for the fun project.

Why do they need to make a full time living from working on these projects?

I don't understand why this is suddenly an issue - I use a 40 year old free program daily (Emacs), which has always been developed for free by volunteers (including me).

Think about the software you use - IME software created to make someone richer is usually worse than software written out of passion.

As mentioned in books published TWENTY YEARS AGO, many companies working in Open-Source make their money in value-added services and support.

My side gig has been doing that for the last 22 years.

And, that's the number-one answer from chatGPT.

It's also totally okay to not blithely jam the words together but to pretend hyphens are a thing.

I think the route of giving it all away for free and either offering hosting if the project needs it or (business) support is the most successful way of doing this.

I have no problems whatsoever with donation buttons / banners (like Krita does) but I'm afraid random donations is not really a sustainable model for most projects. I try to remember to donate to projects I use a lot (especially if it's for work) but it is another thing on my todo list and not one with high priority, so I don't do it as often as I'd like ... 😓

I think most of the other answers are good. For enterprise software I think, non community contributed, security updates behind a paywall are reasonable too. I know all updates can be behind a paywall and still be FOSS but it really hurts the public good / community aspects that make FOSS great to me.

From a policy stand point I think stakeholders should sue when a major security breach tanks gets identities stolen, the stock or worse and CTO failed to buy down any risk with SLAs on key software.