Almost all popular open-source software has paying patrons – companies/universities that give time to the individual to work on that open-source project while k

Almost all popular open-source software has paying patrons – companies/universities that give time to the individual to work on that open-source project while keeping them gainfully employed. In recent memory I cannot think of any serious open-source software that doesn't have individuals from well-paying tech companies contributing to it in significant ways. These projects are usually of higher quality and are done in the spirit of the open-source ethos - everything is done in the open with open governance etc. Usually expectation is everyone contributes and gets a lot of value for a lot less effort due to the collective effort. Then, there's a long tail of unpaid software that's put out in GitHub etc. whose quality is highly suspect. They are done as a hobby of an individual, may not even have a proper project community structure (website, mailing list, seeking contributors etc). Then, there's another category of open-source – these are commercial ventures that want to garner the goodwill associated with open-source model/movement to further the adoption of their commercial offering. Nothing wrong with it, as long as they are honest about it. They are different in some fundamental ways. They intend to control the fate of the project very tightly and privately and there is no open governance of the project. Entirety of the project may not be open-source. Big chunks of the critical functionality may be closed source. At some point they may change the open-source license of the project to make it more onerous. Some of the best open-source software that I have seen that do both open-source and commercial parts really really well are sqlite, haproxy, nginx.