Comment on Why are there so many graybeards in FOSS?
masterspace@lemmy.ca 2 weeks agoYes, but I would point out that:
a) a bunch of those commercially supported Foss projects still started out as a personal project of one of a small handful of programmers that then got popular and exploded.
b) more importantly yes, a lot of commercially useful FOSS is developed by paid developers working at tech companies as part of their line of work, stuff like browsers, languages, frameworks, packages, etc. but a lot of the most jconic and beloved consumer facing FOSS applications are not as it’s harder to monetize at that point since you’re not building on top of those projects.
pelya@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Tech companies spend effort on a FOSS project when either it’s their main product, or when they have no choice, it’s licensed under GPL and there are no BSD or Apache-licensed alternatives. Contributions are usually done by individual employees in their after-hours time, and most managers see it as directly benefitting their competition.