[sauceop]

The open source projects that are most threatened like this are the more complex infrastructure software that doesn't naturally get build as a side-effect of other work.

If you look at a company like Red Hat, they're focused on building things that will work reliably for the diverse needs of their thousands of paying customers. Whereas a lot of open-source contributions are really about solving the contributor's specific problem.

Sometimes if you get many people each making a contribution that scratches their specific itch you end up with something great. Other times it isn't cohesive.