Yes, he was definitely putting the cart before the horse. Forcing people to pay for every tiny little project would lead to far less open-source activity on the low-end. The lack of support may be a problem, but it's necessary–not everything is worth supporting. And frankly, a couple dozen people paying $5 is not enough to seriously encourage anyone to commit themselves to long-term maintenance. You have to turn the complaint on the head and ask yourself are we better with the code out in the wild even if it's unsupported than not existing at all? It's hard to deny that the answer is yes. Even if you have to learn it and self-support, there's still an opportunity to save time and for new ideas to blossom.

> Forcing people to pay for every tiny little project would lead to far less open-source activity on the low-end.

Forced? Don't think that was ever suggested nor even a remote possibility.

>You have to turn the complaint on the head and ask yourself are we better with the code out in the wild even if it's unsupported than not existing at all?

Well, yeah. I don't think anyone's really claimed this is some stark choice betwee financial support or nothing at all. The article, to me, was about improving the existing model.

> They get financial backing AFTER they're successful as a side effect (because the corporations use them).

The relationship is a little more symbiotic than you're implying. Financial backing is as much a "side effect" as it is a necessary pre-cursor to any kind of genuine wider adoption.

> Linux. GCC. emacs. gdb. you name it.

Hadoop, Mongo, Android, My/Postgre/SQL

> Heck Linux certainly wasn't started with Linus thinking he'd gain anything _financial_ with it.

Don't think I ever implied otherwise. This isn't really about motives.

Financial backing quite often simply means that a developer(s) can work on a given project full time. There are real limits to what can be achieved part time and with crowd-sourced code. Take video editing in Linux as an obvious example of this phenomenon.