Linux, Python and a lot of other OSS born from hobbyists or during high interests rates times.
The problem is HashiCorp used VCs money for the wrong purpose.
Tech has come a long way since the creation of linux or python. Even these projects have gotten to a level of sophistication that it would implode without big tech support.
Why do you think you don't see any interesting oss tech from hobbyists is these days? All the ones you see are either incubated inside FAANG or VC backed.
To build, grow and maintain anything thats interesting these days will require a group of pretty talented people and these people have plenty of other prospects where they'll get paid pretty well.
I do, in fact, see interesting OSS tech from hobbyists these days.
The VC-backed and FAANG stuff is more visible because it has a bigger promotional budget, and it very often is inherentlty more broadly interesting.
But it also tends to be quickly pivoted away from unless it meets quick wide commercial success.
The worst thing is that all this FAANG or VC backed companies make a lot of people believe that they are the only viable way.
> Why do you think you don't see any interesting oss tech from hobbyists is these days?
Actually not true, just an example, https://github.com/drakkan/sftpgo. But there are plenty of them.
What I'm getting at with "interesting" are projects that look more like the latter.
There are plenty of exceptions where you have projects that fits (barely) into the interesting category while staying just below the complexity threshold that it can be maintained by one guy and a few community contributions.
Yet they are still the exception to the rule and even then you often have one of the following outcomes: - The features or the project as a whole get stolen/integrated by FAANG, hobbyist burns out and hobbyist ends up depreciating/archiving the project. - The project gains a lot of momentum and gets supported by FAANG. - Hobbyist burns out and depreciates/archives the project - Hobbyist commercialises the project.
P.S. Entropy is a ditch and this is what many of the HN utopians fail to understand, it takes a immense amount of work to build a somewhat self-sustaining entity to fend of entropy. I have theory that its one of the blindspots of being young and technical. You see the world as a massive legacy monolith that you have to refactor into these cool edgy microservices which is super easy and all the problems will be solved and happily ever after. While I don't disagree with parts of the original claim, the solution IMO will end modern civilisation as we know it. I have a bunch of labels for this kind of thinking and the people who preach it but I know señor dang wont be happy about it so I digress..
1) FAANGs won't exist forever, software/hardware development will continue even after FAANGS will be disassembled by antitrust, go in bankruptcy or stop investing for any other cause.
2) Linux and a lot of other complex software was developed when collaboration was not so easy as today, when GitHub didn't exist and most of the people have very slow internet connection compared to today.
Building anything interesting at scale requires a group of very talented people collaborating over a period of time. This is not easy and its definitely not free or cheap.
While hobbyists and tinkerers might invent groundbreaking tech, it takes resources to propel such projects to their full potential. Resources require vested interests (skin in the game).
If it wasn't for Googles and other early adopters strong financial motive (vested interest) to avoid paying Microsoft/IBM licensing fees, linux would likely still be a niche operating system for hobbyists.
Every major OSS tech you can think is supported by either a consortium of commercial interests, a single direct commercial interest or public grants. Public grants are extremely unreliable because of reasons I will refrain from explaining to avoid the wrath of señor dang.
P.S. Git was invented by Linus out of necessity because linux crossed a threshold of complexity and scale.
I'm not saying FAANGs/VCs didn't give a huge boost to the OSS tech in the last 15 years but saying that without them OSS won't be possible it's simply not true.