What an absolutely bizarre thing to write in response to a link to a completely free software project with 541 contributors. Here you have hundreds of people who are exactly giving away highly skilled work for free.
Software has such a vibrant open source scene because software has probably the biggest impact-per-unit-time out of anything ever created and it has close to zero development cost and distribution cost. It's basically, skill+laptop+time. That's all you need to get a product in the hands of millions.
There is a reason why there is mountains of free software and comparative dust mounds of free media, free hardware, free services.
LLM progress in the last year notwithstanding, software is not cheap to develop. I wouldn't be surprised if e.g. this project had multiple millions of dollars of labor embedded in it.
Software, like media, is simply free to replicate, and there's a much stronger culture of "I made this for me, and it costs me nothing to give it to you too, so you can have it too." There is a lot of free media out there though: music, art, short films, games or game mods, etc. What they don't have is marketing.
Software is the cheapest of all engineering disciplines by far. Literally the only cost is time and a $20 computer.
Compare to open source hardware, where you need a lab with thousands of dollars in equipment, need to consume supplies to build stuff and need to pay manufacturers for prototyping.
Software benefits enormously from having zero dependance on the physical world. Its about as resource intensive as building houses in Minecraft.
Just like doctors' and lawyers' consultations are cheap? That time is extremely expensive if it's something you are buying. Companies spend over $200/hour for the time of a competent engineer. Like I said, I wouldn't doubt this project here "costing" 7-figures despite being free. Things like Blender or KDE are probably 8 figures.
