Good point
(media.scored.co)
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The only difference is that you might need a job flipping burgers at McDonalds to pay your bills, while you work on your open source project a few hours on your spare time if you work on a small project that doesn't generate any money.
Which you would have to do with proprietary code as well, when you after a 40 hour work week in the office, among pajeets, doesn't earn enough money to make a living as the pajeets work for 10% of a normal developers wage. So unless you wanna share a 1 bedroom apartment with 20 pajeets, you'll have to take that second job at McDonalds anyway.
Some kid writes some software, publishes it under, say GPL.
The software turns out to be useful. Lots of people start using it.
Company X wants to use his software, but they want to make changes to it. Rather than having their employees work on it, they hire the kid at a decent salary to keep working on it, in the direction they want.
If the software becomes super popular (like Linux) then the kid forms his own company that works for hire for other companies on a contract basis, often selling certification programs or training courses and whatnot, and at the same time, soliciting donations.
This has happened thousands of times to thousands of people in the software industry. Go look up any piece of moderately successful open source software projects and you'll see a success story of the people behind it.
To say there's no money in open source software or call it communism is just retarded.