The difference is, you can’t fork and fix it yourself when it’s closed source from someone else. and a surprising amount of code running in every company it’s ‘someone else’s’ code even when it’s internal and part of the same company.
Even at the FAANGs I've worked at, it was pretty common for bugs to never get triaged or even looked at for long periods of time that impacted some users, or serious bugs that weren't in the critical path for common use cases to stay unfixed for years. Libraries that weren't actively 'owned' by anyone sometimes go even worse.
1. There are business that maintain open source software, today. That are paid maintenance. This can work for some cases. This can even work for libraries as some already do this.
2. Linux is a good example. There are legal organizations that surround it. From Linus to most of the contributors. People are paid for the work. Through legal organizations. With contracts involved. It's not an example of open source with volunteers doing the work out of the goodness of their heart.
3. Open source software can be great. But, just like an electrician doesn't just do electrical work in order to make a living... the same applies to open source software development.
4. There is a lot of open source maintained by companies that is not their core business value. This is reliable and production ready software. Sometimes people do make change requests to fix or improve these.
This is true, but in my experience they end up complaining about the same thing. Competitors using their code to make money. Often this results in them becoming non-open-source, for example, Elasticsearch. I personally think the approach that Elastic has taken is the right approach and is what we should embrace instead of the whole open source is great and we should all do open source to help our careers.
> 4. There is a lot of open source maintained by companies that is not their core business value. This is reliable and production ready software. Sometimes people do make change requests to fix or improve these.
These are also often under-maintained.
> 3. Open source software can be great. But, just like an electrician doesn't just do electrical work in order to make a living... the same applies to open source software development.
I highly suspect the majority of them only do electrical work to make a living.
It's important to note that Elastic was a VC funded company that is now a listed public company trying to make open source maintainership their businesses as a high growth business. This is different from being a sustained maintainer making OK to decent compensation for their work.
The type of business matters. Is it high growth (or VC which is high growth) or is it consistent maintaining.
> These are also often under-maintained.
Sometimes they are and sometimes they are not. Are there any stats on this?
> I highly suspect the majority of them only do electrical work to make a living.
My point is that they don't ONLY DO electrical work. They have legal businesses, they do invoices, they handle accounting and money comes and goes, etc. They don't get to forget how businesses and finances happen while hoping for donations.
Especially if contributing to the kernel is something they only do infrequently rather than as part of their day job.