Recently I worked on my C++ WinReg library for a couple of hours, adding some useful methods, testing them, and packaging the library for vcpkg distribution.
At a reasonable rate of $150/hour, that would be $300.
And that’s not even counting all the many hours I spent in total on this open-source project.
This library has currently more than 260 stars on GitHub, and many forks. It seems to me it is used by many people.
But who pays for it?
I think there should be some process to allow developers of useful open-source code hosted on GitHub (or on other platforms as well) to be fairly compensated for their work.