I'm going to take a contrarian point - what is so bad about vanity projects? I'm not going to touch on the connection between nationalism and these vanity proje

I'm going to take a contrarian point - what is so bad about vanity projects? I'm not going to touch on the connection between nationalism and these vanity projects, but the fact that teams can be sponsored to work on their own OSs or their own CPUs is valuable in itself. Having more people be able to learn about complex systems that would otherwise require working at one of the specialized places for those - the Linux Kernel Team, Microsoft, AMD, Intel, etc, seems like a good thing. It is a way for a new set of people to get practical experience without the constraints of being inside an existing organization.