<i>The arts would become a hobby that people do before they get a &#x27;real job&#x27; that is able to support them as adults.</i><p>This is already the case for most people, and how society at large sees it. The barista with an art degree and the waiter aspiring to be an actor are both cliches at this point. The arts are intrinsically difficult business models because of their anti-rivalrous nature, their varying scarcity and in the digital age, increasing intangibility. Just as artists had patrons in the past, today they have complicated chains of publishers and distributors they must go past. As those become less relevant with digital distribution, then the problems of saturation set in.<p><i>Look at software for an example -- your little open source effort is in fact bankrolled by the open source ecosystem that is subsidized by Facebook, Google, big VC money, etc.</i><p>Well, not exactly.<p>The parts of open source that get subsidized tend to be limited in their scope, primarily user-facing and application development software -- what you would expect for media companies to care about, and what is easiest to sell as a service.<p>Infrastructure and systems software has always been treated as more of a commodity and receives relatively little attention. Some companies devote teams to enhancing it, but much of it remains dominated by private individuals and researchers, the latter sometimes working as part of research institutes that are both privately and publicly funded.