an open source project like Rails. Except it’s neither open source, nor unpaid.
Do people still think of big, successful open source projects as unpaid? Rails, for example, was created at Basecamp/37Signals. Most Linux contributions come from companies like IBM. Or am I the one who's out of touch?
It depends on the project. Some projects (can't think of examples off the top of my head, sorry, but they have come up here on HN) do reach pretty widespread usage without anyone being paid to work on them full time, and potentially with only one unpaid developer on the project.
Do people still think of big, successful open source projects as unpaid? Rails, for example, was created at Basecamp/37Signals. Most Linux contributions come from companies like IBM. Or am I the one who's out of touch?