One of my favorite moments of GDC 2011 came during the Q&A session of a talk by Rovio about Angry Birds:

Q: “Hi Peter, could you tell me which physics engine Angy Birds uses?”

Peter (Rovio): “Box2D”

Q: “Great. Would you consider giving credit to Box2D in your game?”

Peter (Rovio): “Yes, of course”

Q: “Thank you! By the way, I am Erin Catto the creator of Box2D”

Peter (Rovio): “Great! I would like to talk to you after the session”

Seriously...Erin Catto would be a millionare with even the most minimal of pricing structures for using Box2D, assuming another open source engine didn't come to take its place.

Should all of the startups on HN owe the creators of PHP, rails, python, and every other framework a Ferrari too?

It was fashionable in the late 90s dot com bubble to give stock to Linus Torvalds and other open source luminaries before your Linux company went public.

In 1999 Red Hat and VA Linux, both leading developers of Linux-based software, presented Torvalds with stock options in gratitude for his creation. That same year both companies went public and Torvalds' share value temporarily shot up to roughly $20 million

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds

See also http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/1999121000105NWLF

It wouldn't hurt the successful ones at all to pay something back.

Especially considering so many sites are fundamentally built on top of open source while being closed source.

>Should all of the startups on HN owe the creators of PHP, rails, python, and every other framework a Ferrari too?

If they are successful and the rely on those programs, sure, why not?

That's how you get more support for Open Source software, and more funds for projects that benefit everyone. OSS was moving faster at the late nineties-early 2000s, when huge companies employed tons of people to work on the Linux kernel, libs, frameworks, the desktop, etc, that it does now.

It may be a cause or effect of this, but the open source culture has fractured in the 2000s to many smaller projects or libraries instead of these huge mega-projects (say Linux, GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, OpenOffice) that mostly come from the 90s.

I'd say it's an effect. Without corporate funding large and co-ordinated projects (Gnome, KDE, OpenOffice et al) have fallen by the wayside.

That's why progress has got so slow the last 6-8 years in so many parts of the OSS world (and on lots of proprietary software, that lazily relies on OSS). Things like Gnome or OpenOffice are essentially the same as they were 10 years ago, whereas the proprietary alternatives have gotten tons of changes.

GTK+, the main toolkit behind Gnome has one (1!) major contributor (which complained about the issue). In a proper world, something like this, used by so many millions, should have at least a full time team of 10 persons.

Contrast the additions to GTK+ in the last 10 years with the development of the corresponding Cocoa libs, and it's like night and day. A tree-view widget here, a spinner there, ...

Small libraries and stuff can still flourish under such an environment, but not big, co-ordinated projects.

I'd agree otherwise, but GNOME is a bad example. In the last couple of years they've rewritten a lot of their stack. All APIs are now on GObject Introspection, the GNOME Shell is a completely new thing, written in JavaScript, new set of default applications, etc.

But then again, they seem to still be receiving some amount of corporate sponsorship from Red Hat.

A few years back (when Nokia stopped supporting the project) things looked a lot more gloomy: http://wingolog.org/archives/2008/06/07/gnome-in-the-age-of-...

Then again, any desktop environment or toolkit is bound to be somewhat unsexy these days when the focus is on web and mobile.

I also wrote about this back in 2008: http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/gnome_in_decay/