I think the issue is more high-level, a question of "how to start and sustain a small-ish infrastructure-ish open-source business?" There are successful open-s

I think the issue is more high-level, a question of "how to start and sustain a small-ish infrastructure-ish open-source business?" There are successful open-source projects, sure. The predominant MO seams to be for the main developer(s) to have a true "day job" which implicitly or explicitly finances him while he works on the open source thing. If he's lucky, the project can transform into a business a full-time job. If not, screw it, it's business as usual. As for thinking that something very useful will be well paid for, I think the OpenSSL project disproved it once and for all: unless someone is actively thinking about finances and going the extra mile to attract business and money to the open source project, it will be both governed and treated as a hobby project. tl;dr: if you're betting on getting rich on writing yet another web server, I hope you have rich parents ;) That's unfortunate, but it's the truth.