> And if enough people come to hang out and have fun

Is Hurd there? I mean, you obviously don't frame 'success' with an open source system in financial terms, but I would argue that developing a critical development mass is pretty important. Without that, the project will wither and die.

Open source is sort of an "attention economy", so the currency isn't dollars, but developer interest.

Fooling around with something for the joy of learning is a motivator, but I don't know that it's enough to sustain a project, long term.

And Hurd very much is a 'product' in the economic sense, whether it's open source, not for profit, or whatever.