See this rare interview from 2018: https://sachachua.com/blog/2018/09/interview-with-thierry-vo...
My impression is that most open source projects that do not habitually burn their creators are either strategic assets to a handful of multi billion dollar companies, in which case at least core contributors get a normal life and see some actual upside for their work; or part time labors of love of talented individuals who have either not hit the scale where they would need to engage with a large number of users or who are very good at saying No.
Even the rare super-elite developers like Zig's Andrew Kelley who manage to get full-time funding for their work via patreon/github don't seem to pull in more than a fraction of what they'd make in normal employment as a single person for their whole project.
Open source started out as asymmetrical warfare against The Man (personified to Microsoft) but by now has been mostly co-opted into a form of voluntary self-exploitation to enrich mega-corps.
I wonder if there is a way out of that.
After all, the issue is that mathematics is simple. Humans don't like simple things. And when humans think they have found simple things they start wars or some novel iteration of discrimination against others.
It's amazing how true this is. You can see it very clearly in your day-to-day as a software engineer. The vast majority of people you will encounter in your career favor fancy, complicated solutions to problems that could be easily solved with fewer resources. And yet when you float those ideas, you're laughed at.
I like simple things, am I not human?
Just take any simple thing and start thinking of any aspect of it. That itself is not simple!!
Creating new complex things is easy, because you can assemble them from existing simple things. Creating new simple things is more difficult, because you must go beyond assembling existing simple things.
Simple things lose their signaling value when they become well-known. Complex things lose their signaling value when they are replaced by simple things.
Therefore, it makes perfect sense that humans attack simple things: they threaten the signaling value of the easier to create complex things.
I the tech-world i have to say i love simple things, always.
Professional being a person who gets paid to do work.
Clearly his development of software that is widely used is not in question.
Twenty years ago, I maintained some Free Software projects. I wasn't employed in IT at all, in fact at the time I was studying towards a soft humanities field, and all my knowledge of programming was self-taught. So much of the other Linux software I used seemed to come from similar people. After all, the draw of Linux and GNU tools was that you were free to tinker with your computer and teach yourself from books, no expensive commercial software required.
I get the impression that laypeople developing and maintaining packages has become less common as the open-source movement took off and more paid employees at corporations started to do these kind of tasks. Similarly, the premiere "news for nerds" site today is Hacker News, which comes out of the corporate world, while its forebear Slashdot of the early millennium had a more varied mix of professional IT people and hobbyists.
Some of the most renowned folks from my generation or the one before me are not professional software engineers. And those people were the ones that valued Free Software more than the ones who are professional software engineers.
I often wonder if this is one of the bigger reasons why FOSS is doing so much worse these days.
I am 45 and I experienced the net and hackerism of 20 years ago as a wonderful world which it is no more today and I can't really say why.
It made sense for them, of course, since they can't hire that many people and just have them sit on their thumbs all day.
John Kemmeny (one of the inventors of Basic) wrote a book in 1972, "Man and the Computer," summarizing the development of the computer up until that point, and making some predictions about the future. He was surprisingly accurate, and predicted the internet, online encyclopedias, computers in every house, and a lot of other stuff.
There was one big thing that he was wrong about, though. He expected that in the future more or less everybody using computers would have a basic understanding of programming, and be able to automate simple tasks for themselves. I think if that prediction had come true, open source projects developed by amateur, non-professionals would be a lot more common.
For a while, it looked like things were headed that way, but at some point companies realized they could make more money if computers were primarily used for media consumption, and so the interfaces and expectations about users have been getting dumbed down ever since.