[doktrin]

> They get financial backing AFTER they're successful as a side effect (because the corporations use them).

The relationship is a little more symbiotic than you're implying. Financial backing is as much a "side effect" as it is a necessary pre-cursor to any kind of genuine wider adoption.

> Linux. GCC. emacs. gdb. you name it.

Hadoop, Mongo, Android, My/Postgre/SQL

> Heck Linux certainly wasn't started with Linus thinking he'd gain anything _financial_ with it.

Don't think I ever implied otherwise. This isn't really about motives.

Financial backing quite often simply means that a developer(s) can work on a given project full time. There are real limits to what can be achieved part time and with crowd-sourced code. Take video editing in Linux as an obvious example of this phenomenon.