I have an idea:
OnlyDesks. It’s an onlyfans account for FOSS devs. Not a different site, just a straight up only fans account. You sub to it, and you get to watch a FOSS dev sit at their desk and do their stuff. You cannot interact with them, you can just check in on the webcam, like those sites where you can see the cats in a rescue. The feed is randomized, so whenever they’re live (does OF do live?), it is completely random which dev you’ll get, but you can go back through the past videos to see your favorite moments (opening yet another can of monster energy yet) again and again.
If all the Linux users sign up for the 9.99 a month tier, we’ll have the year of the Linux desktop in no time!
Yeah, “nobody” was obviously a bit polemic, but if you’d have to pay the same money for FOSS as for CSS, I doubt many people would pay for e.g. Gimp over Photoshop.
Also, there’s the structure issue. Windows is developed mostly in-house, and the few bits they don’t DIY they pay for.
An average Linux distro is developed by easily over 1000 individual little projects. And yes, theoretically people could pay for Fedora, and the Fedora people then pay a whole tree of dependant projects, but that would be incredibly complicated.