Thanks for the links. > Figure 4 shows the employment status of the survey respondents. The overwhelming majority are employed full-time. The next two most pop

Thanks for the links. > Figure 4 shows the employment status of the survey respondents. The overwhelming majority are employed full-time. The next two most popular answers were self-employed/freelancer or full-time student. This makes sense as most of the skills necessary to contribute to FOSS are highly valued in today’s job market (programming, technical documentation, etc.). The way I understand this is that most contributors are employed full-time, not that most contributors are employed to work on free software full-time.. > In aggregate, of 577 survey respondents, 48.7% said they are paid for time spent on open source contributions by their current employer, 2.95% said another party pays them, 4.33% said they are not paid because their employment contract prevents them from accepting payment for open source development, and 44.02% said they are not paid for any other reason. So almost half of all contributors are actually paid to work on free software projects full-time. That is a fairly high number, but I feel it's still not that overwhelming. > Clearly, corporate funding is concentrated in a few large projects, which inevitably means that there will be volunteers out there who carry a huge burden keeping critical smaller projects going. I suppose it's just basic economy - a piece of software that solves a general problem (e.g. a kernel) will be used by more people then software that serves some specific purpose (e.g. text editor). But it seems to me that in no way is free software dependent on any company funding - that are more then enough hackers out there to keep the thing going, even if every company in the world decided to pull the plug at once.