If you look at the core technology only, then you often just need a handful of experts. It's all the rest that is the problem. The REAPER DAW was written by on

If you look at the core technology only, then you often just need a handful of experts. It's all the rest that is the problem. The REAPER DAW was written by one person. The initial Linux kernel was written by one person. cURL was written by one person and even your BMW uses it [1]. The original Skype was written by three programmers. The list goes on... Of course, you later get a lot of maintainers joining the projects. But you certainly don't need 40 000 programmers if you are not selling your product, or not selling it yet. And even then I think a lot of those jobs are, while they are useful for AWS, not part of the core development. [1] https://curl.haxx.se/docs/companies.html https://curl.haxx.se/docs/companies.html