on their companies dime, which means they work for a rare company building open source solutions
at the end of their day, on their weekend, or during their vacation

Most FOSS devs are in position two. By a large margin. They could be relaxing, or earning more money doing freelancing to make ends meet, but instead they are trying to build something they want to see happen. That requires focusing on the important tasks and that often means not having time to spend on poorly reported bugs that are actually users just not RTFM and opening issues. It wastes the devs time, and projects with too much of this have development stagnate and are frequently shuttered.

And devs that just do this to get a better job stop contributions once their new job takes over their life, and then the project suffers.

Users need to appreciate FOSS devs more because some of the most important projects we need in 2025 are developed only because they want to see them happen.

[–] ApertureUA@lemmy.today 7 points 7 hours ago

You forgot unempl*yed teens