As someone that runs a profitable FOSS business, you can indeed get paid well for FOSS. Just be better than the status quo by a lot. Thankfully it is a low bar.
I took a look at your bio but after a glance (forgive me if I’m missing something obvious) it looks like you do consulting but I don’t see FOSS for sale. I’m curious what your project is if it’s something else, but if it’s consulting that makes sense. Consulting doesn’t really work for a lot of categories of software though. Like nobody is going to pay FUTO for consulting on following YouTubers.
We sell support, customization, ensuring packages some people care about most are supported, etc.
Also some people just pay monthly to ensure we stay viable because we save them a lot of work trying to implement and maintain what we do themselves.
Look at all the content creators that make a living on patreon etc. If you give stuff away for free people value but also make it really easy to support you, often people do.
An example outside my projects is Octoprint. Last time the founder had donations public, she was pulling in like 5k/mo for one person just doing FOSS dev for something totally free no one needs consulting for.
Our own projects individually are not that profitable as they are much more niche, so consulting makes much more sense for us.
That said, for projects that are fully open source you can get listed on opencollective so people can make tax deductible donations to specific open source projects, like the stagex project I founded: https://opencollective.com/stagex/donate
If you are going to do something for public good, make it easy for people to justify donating to you for a tax write off!
Interessting point with the tax right off. I asked my boss to donate to a open source software we used a lot in our dev department and he labeled it as license costs because donations aren't something he could argue for (big company tho).
