They’d like to imagine a world where there’s no such thing as sales and marketing, where they can interact with humans and especially business manager types who tell them what to build as little as possible.

So many developers seem to genuinely not understand why their contributions to software used by millions don’t magically generate income.

If you’re a FOSS developer you need to grow up and do one of the following rather than moaning about not being paid:

1. Accept that you’re not getting paid and do the work as an exercise in personal growth and enjoyment. Don’t make it your job and don’t do burnout-inducing things like providing support for free.

2. Come up with a business model. Learn something about sales and marketing. E.g., nginx plus.

3. Get a corporate sponsor and deal with having a manager type telling you what to do and/or corporate employees steering the direction of your project.

> As such, Andre's goal with Ruby Together was characterized as an effort to fund development activities—initially his own, but eventually others—by paying themselves a market hourly rate. I remember being extremely sympathetic to this perspective, having also wasted countless hours of my life maintaining open source for free only for others to benefit from it.

You're misrepresenting the article.

> I remember being extremely sympathetic to this perspective, having also wasted countless hours of my life maintaining open source for free only for others to benefit from it. I also recall a figure like either $200 or $250 per hour being mentioned as the rate he was effectively paying himself. Whatever the rate actually was, I distinctly remember thinking, "holy shit, that's a lot higher than individual donors would probably assume."

I agree that maintainers of popular open-source projects deserve to be paid enough for a decent standard of living, but $200/hr (* 40hr/wk * 50wk/yr = $400k/yr) is excessive.

Through all this I will say that Ruby Central hired a non-technical director whose responsibilities I would expect to include communication and operational expertise to not let these situations happen or at least contain the volatility. That was a failure by Ruby Central regardless of the actions of engineers.