Human beings have this strange desire to be fed, have shelter and other such mundane stuff, all of those clearly less important than software in the big scheme of things, of course.
Many open source are not core business but supporting layers of overall organisations getting free PRs. Others are pet projects that tried to do too many things and overextended themselves for little additional value failing any sort of sustainability logic. Others had a larger range of features required than the original dev was aware of.
The beauty of open source is that there are all kinds of reasons for contributing to it, and all are valid. For some, it's just a hobby. For others, like Valve, it's a means of building their own platform. Hardware manufacturers like AMD (and increasingly Nvidia) contribute drivers to the kernel because they want to sell hardware.
I believe that, at the end of the day, open source enthusiasts still need to make a living.
God forbid a passion project stay just a passion project. You don't see this monetization perspective in the hobbyist 3D printing community or airbrushing communities. This is directly a result of how much OSS is framed as a "time sink" instead of enjoyable hobby. I don't like this narrative, and don't think its healthy.
MinIO is absolutely not a passion project, it's a business.
Why?