> without the profit motive, the people involved don't have a motivation to do the fit-and-finish work that's necessary for people to pick the product up and ac

> without the profit motive, the people involved don't have a motivation to do the fit-and-finish work that's necessary for people to pick the product up and actually use it This is true for most open source projects, but not all. For instance, Linux is of extremely high quality. Largely because there is a profit motive for many people. However, all is not lost. I can't tell you the number of times I picked up an open source project. Forked it, cleaned it up, added features, and put it into production. That's the real power of open source.