[cwgem]

Well, I would say that something of a corporate patronage or making it big is a side effect of having a big idea that sells. If you want a business to give you lots of money you need to create something that will meet business needs. Not only that but you can't assume that businesses will find you're great idea and throw money at it, there's personal marketing involved as well.

Yes it's quite a shame that we may have lost a few projects that might have gone somewhere with investment, but I believe that to be the nature of the beast. Also my thought was that the open source movement was about contributing out of good will, and if you made some money off of it great.

[doktrin]

> Also my thought was that the open source movement was about contributing out of good will, and if you made some money off of it great.

I think OSS contributors are driven by a fairly wide variety of motivations. Linus, for instance, has spoken out on this issue :

    I do not see open source as some big goody-goody "let's 
    all sing kumbaya around the campfire and make the world 
    a better place". No, open source only really works if 
    everybody is contributing for their own selfish reasons. 

    Now, those selfish reasons by no means need to be about 
    "financial reward", though.[1]

I made sure to include the last part, because it's both relevant to this discussion and it "completes" the statement. OSS contribution isn't necessarily about monetary reward, nor did the article claim it was.

However, money does happen to be necessary to devote time to a given endeavor. Without it, the best a project can hope for is a collection of part-timers, which is ultimately limiting.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18419231