You both feel right to me. We've found a vast amount of really important& exciting technology come from unhindered & unencumbered open sourcerers, people enjoying buding great things.

And I agree with you, that these people as their software ascends in use & importance, need support.

The term professionalization is dangerous to apply here though. There's a lot of baggage & constraint, power/hieraechy dynamics, employer/employee relationships that are no fun, are against the spirit of the thing. To have this vibrant, radical, free spirited altermative, & to turn around & try to consume the spirit of the thing, digest it into the the dun, boring, mundane mediocre shit-show world is a sure & sad way to wreck the thing. Yet these people deserve & need support somehow. Finding innovative ways to support those doing vast social good without binding & restricting them, without entailing them into your projects & curtailing their potential.

That all said, at this point, we just need to start funding these people far far better, step 1. These concerns about whether professionalization see destroys our golden vibrancy are abstract when so few (& only such select industrially useful) projects garner any support at all.