I don't get your point. Are you defending SO as some sort of gaming company? Even gaming companies have tournaments with enormous prize pools and usually award their patrons in some way. Tournaments, teams and sponsorships are the lifeblood of professional gaming.
If you go to his profile on SO, you will see that he advertises his company.
Also, I wasn't speaking about "professional gamers", I was speaking about every day people that forked over $100 for a game (or often $1,000 for many games) and then spend years playing it at home - unprofessionally, for no money.
It's just how some people chose to spend their time because they themselves find the experience gratifying. And in his case, there is at least a small pittance of financial gain through advertising and publicly verifiable reputation.
However unfathomable it might be, he may just genuinely like to spend his time here on earth knowing that he's helping people.
He clearly has expertise so I doubt he's poor or hurting for cash. Maybe an older fellow who has had enough of the grind and decides to spend his days sharing his knowledge with others.
Someone like this needs SO as much as they need him, it's mutually beneficial. He impacts millions, they make money. Both get what they came for.
All user content published is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 per [1] and backups/dumps of all this CC BY-SA 4.0 content are published every few months to the Internet Archive [2].
CC BY-SA means you could use that latest dump to create your own "SQL Q&A" site and charge users for the privilege of looking at Gordon's 76,000 answers to SQL related questions. You would need to attribute Gordon Linoff for the answers provided, amongst other obligations of CC BY-SA 4.0 including an inability to re-license the content.
Many would instinctively want to use a CC BY-NC license because of an unfounded fear of volunteering time to find out later that someone else is collecting a reward. There are many good reasons for avoiding CC NC (and even CC BY) licenses and choosing the least restrictive license possible. There is a good write up on Wikimedia's decision to prohibit CC NC licenses at [3] that explains some of the reasons.
The majority of sites relying on volunteer contributions including Hacker News, Experts Exchange, Quora, Reddit, social media sites, Flickr (mostly), etc do not enforce copyleft licensing and contributions made to these sites could easily be lost forever. Wikipedia and StackOverflow including their volunteers likely wouldn't have enjoyed the same level of success if they used or allowed CC NC (or more restrictive) licensing.
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/104947/is-stack-exc...
Thank you in advanced ;-)