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Wait, what are the original devs getting from it at all? What did they think they were going to get from it?
From one project I worked on: a fun community, experience with managing a project, a nice item on my resume, and an unexpected distaste of companies pretending to love open source and not giving anything back.
Oh they do love using open source for sure. It's free after all! /s
A nice item on my resume presumes a company sees profits which you are assuming a company desiring profits is willing to make 0 profit deals when spending money on assets. It's flawed at its core.
Capitalism forbids it
Oftentimes it's someone creating and maintaining a piece of software or tooling for themselves and their own benefit. They just happen to be nice and forward thinking enough to share it.
There are donations, even of those big corpo (although way to little).