open-source software is much more profitable to mega-corps
Also, yeah, stat is indeed from my ass, but I would argue that it is very optimistic. Of all the developers I personally know that have tried their hands at making a living wage from working open-source software, I know 0 that succeeded. It may be anecdotal, but that is a sample size of between 300 and 400 given the people I trained, that trained with me or worked with me. A few are still trying, I do what I can to support their projects, because I was there. Unless you were there for so long your software is infrastructure (eg curl, sqlite...) success is nigh impossible nowadays. Open-source was a career choice 20+ years ago, but nowadays if it is profitable it is generally because the free version is open-source freemium