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much free software is done on spare time, so people are most often personally involved in their "babies". Creating an institution allows one to take some step back, but so may the motivation... I wonder things are really this way...

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I think a combination of that, and that with closed projects the drama like this doesn't tend to end up in public purview, sometimes not even among the workers in a company if HR does a good job of not letting it turn into a big issue. That's one kind of situation that companies tend to have an advantage in dealing with since they can more easily fire/remove a person causing problems from a project. That's a lot harder with a publicly developed open source project.

> end up in public purview, sometimes not even among the workers in a company

I agree. The exact same thing happens on closed corporate projects, it just happens behind closed doors. You're right - sometimes a co-founder gets pushed out for political reasons, and even within the company most people don't know what the whole story is.

Also, personal drama can have a negative effect on the rest of the team, and in a business environment, good HR would try to minimize that effect. But there is no such equivalent in the volunteer world.

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