It’s 11:43pm on a Monday night. My 6-week-old son is asleep in my office so my wife can get some uninterrupted rest for the first half of the night. He’s finally asleep now, and I probably should be also after a full day of work. But I’m not done for the day. Even though I’m a software engineer by trade, I’m also a computer programmer by hobby and passion. So I do what I’ve been doing for well over a decade now: I boot up my computer to write some code.
Looks like he wants to create a joint venture of several companies with a couple of independent consultants. Ok. Good luck. He doesn’t owe the world any free labor. He can try to negotiate any kind of compensation scheme for his intellectual property. That’s capitalism.
On a less capitalistic note: The EU provides a bit of government funding for FOSS development on account of the public benefit.
https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/news/2022-04/Development of a Funding Mechanism for Sustaining Open Source Software for European Public Services.pdf