I would amend that to "most big open source projects _eventually_ have a company behind the, _if you're lucky_" Its amazing how much easier its gotten to make

I would amend that to "most big open source projects _eventually_ have a company behind the, _if you're lucky_" Its amazing how much easier its gotten to make a living working _with_ open source code over the years, while it's still often hard for the actual developers/maintainers to get any funding (e.g. ssl, ntpd, etc.) It also seems that companies don't get generally get involved until some 'critical mass' is hit, leaving volunteers, uni's, and foundations doing the initial work (eg linux, apache, NSCA Mosaic, ssh, gcc, glibc/dietlibc/etc, php, perl, vim, nim, ruby, etc.) Even taking from your examples - LLVM started as a uni. project, Webkit was forked from KDE's KHTML, and Rust was a personnel project for years before Mozilla got involved.. edit: god I need coffee. fix poor sentances.