[parafactual]

I'm not sure anyone is disagreeing with you. That is why they said to get another hobby or craft—so that you might want to write software in neglected areas. And of course financial compensation is good for this too, but I wonder if passion projects are of higher quality.

It is true that "empathy" probably won't help much, though.

[AussieWog93]

>I wonder if passion projects are of higher quality

Based on my personal experience, any software that requires a large team to build and maintain seems to be better when it's commercial (and usually proprietary). This is not the case for one-man software projects.

[josephg]

SQLite, NodeJS, the linux kernel, the rust compiler, postgres and others would like a word.

NodeJS tried to move to an industry governance board model around the release of 0.12, where commercial interests took part in running the project. It nearly killed nodejs entirely.

[eptcyka]

People definitely get paid for work on more than half of those projects.

[josephg]

So? None of them are commercial or proprietary projects - which was the contention. There’s nothing inherent about opensource that precludes having people paid to work on it. It’s just harder.