How are (La)TeX projects financed?

To the best of my knowledge all TeX projects are essentially volunteer efforts with some small financial support through donations via the TeX user groups.

As far as the development of LaTeX2e is concerned, that was largely financed through 3 people donating 50% of their royalties for the LaTeX Companion book to the project --- however, in any case, it was not a project that would have supported any of its members (the time and effort put in by the people in the core team over the years was always "for free", we only financed support to go to conferences and the like).

So, as unlikely as it sounds: it was a bunch of "random TeX enthusiasts" who pulled it off, and as I said, the same is true for all other projects I know of in the TeX space, whether it is something like TeX Live, or CTAN, or ConTeXt, or pdfTeX, or LuaTeX, or ...

So consider yourself lucky to get this kind of support for free ... and feel invited to support those projects through donations via TUG.

The TeX project I work on (https://www.speedata.de/) is a purely commercial driven venture (but open source). Is is in the strict sense a TeX project, but not recognized as such, since it is not in any way compatible with LaTeX, ConTeXt or anything similar.

The aim is not in preparing documents as we know but database driven catalogs, price lists, data sheets and other recurring, highly structured documents while using all the nice things TeX offers (great typography for example).

That said: some by-products are (or will be) packaged as TeX/LaTeX packages. For example I have created a solid a qr-code encoding library in Lua, I just need to find some time to wrap it up in a TeX/LaTeX package. The fontloader could also be extracted. Currently I am working on a pure Lua XPath library...