Comment by helen___keller

> if the project is dying because it hinges on people working on a promotion that gives them a /bigger paycheck increase than my yearly income/ - well, good riddance. I'm staying on my side of the fence and continue to not buy a new Tesla every year.

An understandable position but this is simply how competitive environments work.

It’s a lot like the college application mania. There’s tons of gifted high school students who clearly can succeed without needing to volunteer in a foreign country every summer while playing oboe and competing in lacrosse at the state level.

But seats at Harvard are competitive, and those same talented and well-to-do high school seniors often only have college admissions as their ruler to measure their growth and self-worth. So they compete on every angle to try and get into Harvard rather than merely Dartmouth or heaven forbid BU.

It’s reasonable to think working adults should have measures of personal growth that don’t rely on climbing the corporate ladder, but conversely all those who *do* obsess with climbing the ladder will naturally be clustered around places of wealth/prestige, because that’s what they are optimizing for. Much like the Harvard application pool, you’ll find these types doing what it takes to stand out and land that 700k/yr L7 position at Google.

So I guess the answer is that the most stable and secure position for an open source project to be in, is one that does not rely on development being coupled to big tech. I imagine most open source folks could have told you that anyways :)