Open source was mainly powered by academics and motivated by ideology. It was never about income or personal benefit. The current software gold rush in SV like

Open source was mainly powered by academics and motivated by ideology. It was never about income or personal benefit. The current software gold rush in SV like any gold rush is driven by greed and dreams of wealth and has no place for ideology. It is all about taking whatever spades are available. They don't even care about open source, if they had to pay for the spades they would, it just that open source happened to be around. Once this 'taker generation' gets to their 40s and 50s they will start thinking more seriously about the ideology and start contributing back. What else will they do, coders need to code. And the cycle will continue. The only thing to watch out for are increasingly complex 'open source' projects backed by corporates. These are just like closed source projects in that they not amenable to the individual or small team incremental dynamic of open source.