As a developer, if there were no free open source logging library, then I'd be paid to implement one at my work. It be a fun project, but because someone is wil

As a developer, if there were no free open source logging library, then I'd be paid to implement one at my work. It be a fun project, but because someone is willing to do it for free, and give it away, it's hard for me to justify to my employer that we should build our own. This is how the value is measured. But if you take a much harder task, like building a performant and safe JIT language runtime like the OpenJDK, you'll see that even in the open source model, people can't actually deliver it effectively for free. It often starts out from a company that later open sourced it, or it's backed by academia, and contributions require deep expertise, so sometimes companies had to have their own staff contribute to it on their own payroll.