Comment by musicale

I've noticed some interesting things about open source projects that I don't think ESR mentions:

1. Most contributions from volunteers can't be used as-is and require significant work to incorporate; code reviews take a great deal of work, and requests for revision are typically ignored.

2. Paying maintainers and developers is usually the most effective way to enable them to work on the project long-term.

3. In the absence of formal structure, projects can become cults of personality (hopefully benevolent dictators) or community (growing the community is more important than actually creating good software), possibly to the detriment of the project.

4. Companies love it when you build software for them for free, and are eager to exploit any open source software, e.g. by selling it as a service. But they hate it when their own employees work for free on things that the company doesn't care about. They also don't like paying to develop anything (such as open source software) which will be given away for free, perhaps to their competitors.