Originally Posted by
TheAnimus
Most of those I know who brag about it, have an almost religious, ideological zeal.
I've hired a friend of mine, he has made a couple of moderately popular (3M+ downloads) open source projects, he has made almost, but not quite, bugger all from that.
The issue with OSS, is that it relies on people doing work, without being paid, that's fine if they are rich, if they have people who realise their value. But you need only look at something like BSD contirbutions from Whatsapp, the highest ever, despite the fact Apple just took it as their base, but contributed back in that project sod all.
Sure you get some good examples, like WebKit, Chrome and Apple duking it out. But it's often bad when it's like that.
What's important is who is behind something. If their interests are aligned with yours. People often spout nonsense about OSS, that it has no security bugs, because everyone can read the code, this is demonstrably not true. Some say it's the extensible nature, anyone can fork it. This demonstrates a lack of experience or understanding, but code extensibility, is something that has to be designed in, SOLID principles and the like help, but to be able to have different release cycles and such divisions have to be made. Having source code is not required. In fact, often documentation is better, in too many projects, source code is taken as somehow enough. This falls apart with fast moving, and or complex projects.
So no, everyone I know in the FOSS movement is kind of poor, because I don't know any of the superstars.