Free asin Freedom and Free asin beer!!
The phrase free asin freedom and free asin beer means that, i am FREE to do whatever i want with the software. i can turn your flappy bird game into a crappy bird game with big poop birds if i want to. no problem. you dont care. It also means that the software itself is FREE. I do not have to pay you for your flappy bird game.
The movement behind free and libre open source software is partially driven by the FSF and GNU. It is the spread of the idea that the consumer benefits most when the consumer is in control of what their software does. The consumer does not have data collected on them, the consumer does not have their privacy invaded, the consumer does not have their hardware abused, the consumer does not generally get malware, the consumer does not need to rely on a company or a developer to roll out updates, as if the consumer’s need is strong enough, the consumer can do it themselves. this fosters a community of relatively informed people who are willing to actually do work to contribute to stuff. This leads to better software.
Open source as a whole also leads to better security practices - as it has more eyes on it, better functionality - as the people drive development, better intercompatibility - its not locked into any ecosystem, and is just a better way to live life.
People generally, do not get paid any meaningful amount of money for their open source contributions. some larger projects use websites like https://buymeacoffee.com to allow people to donate some amount of money to them, but only a very small fraction of users will ever do that. People generally do not go into open source looking for money. People generally go into open source because they are passionate about the topic. It is still difficult stuff - software development, especially at a low level, requires a decent amount of knowledge, and is not trivial. Passion overrides that. People’s needs also dictate that they would built the software for themselves - I need a script which moves my mouse via my keyboard, for the problems outlined in : I do not want to spend any of my time using a mouse. When I initially could not find a script that did this, I wrote my own. I then shared it on github. It was terrible, for a number of reasons ( it could not drag click, and did not support a lot of what I wanted due to what I understand to be python library limitations ), but the basic functionality worked, and for my usecase, that was wonderful. My immediate instinct was to post it, so that if anyone else needs this, they can have my implementation, and if they find problems with my implementation, they can fork my implementation and fix those problems. Then, I can see their fork, and then I can switch to their fork, so I can have all their fixes! Or I can merge their fork with my fork, if their fixes are stable enough!
It’s such a cool field and i strongly recommend you do your own research to develop your own opinions.