[coldtea]

>Whatever is going on at Mozilla right now, the notion that a piece of open source software even needs to be profitable (let alone supported by a single large company) in order to continue existing is ridiculous.

Large FOSS projects requiring specialists (like Rust does) all seem to supported by companies paying, and often it's a large single company too, whether that's like PHP and Zend, RedHat and various projects, Mono and Xamarin, and so on.

Else you get something that takes fovered to develop further, releases are sporadic, people go on and off, etc.

Heck, GTK+ is/was one of the most adopted FOSS libs, and a dependency for tons of applications, distros, etc. And yet it just had a single dev working on it at some point (like, e.g., a person doing 300 commits each month, and another 50 persons doing 100 comits a year combined).

[narag]

It seems that projects are adopted by companies not because they control the software but because they could if needed: the code is FOSS and mature so in case of main maintainer quitting, they could pay someone to take over.

Also I wonder if browsers really need to be large projects requiring specialists or they've become this way because organisations making them are happy with such an entry barrier.