For real open source projects, it’s a lot of the time not nerds working for free.

All your favorite frameworks and libraries are often developed in house at big companies (angular, react, vue, tensorflow, Kafka, pytorch, k8s, Jenkins, and many many more).

And even then, much of the development on them is done by people who are getting paid to use the frameworks at smaller companies.

There are tons of examples the other way too of course, but even the Linux kernel is mostly corporate commits, Google, Huawei, Oracle, and others.

This isn’t inherently bad, but it’s not as cut and dry as people make it out to be.