I don't think artificial scarcity makes sense as a mental model here. A better way to make money is probably to just find some way where people need you. When you contribute your work to the commons through open source, it earns you a lot of love and admiration. However people don't need you. It's kind of the whole point. The biggest technological services in our society that are the most crucially needed, were all built on open source. Since the whole point of open source is to give you the power and opportunity to build things you can control yourself.

The people who build stuff with open source are very smart, so they usually don't need foss devs as consultants to explain to them how to do it. I make some of the most popular projects on this website. Been doing it for years. I get plenty of donations because my work makes people so happy. But no one has ever offered to pay me for something in return, since I don't have anything with any economic value, other than me myself. So I get plenty of job offers from people who would love to be able to say I'm their employee. Since controlling people is about as valuable as controlling the services people need.

It'd be nice if our cultural mythology about earning your keep doing an honest day's work through fair trade was how the system worked, rather than me needing to depend on the gift economy that's funded by control. But I think there was just so much abuse of the classic models of human cooperation that they just couldn't transition to the digital era, and as such we need to find a way to adapt.