> Your analogy breaks down pretty fast, though > Yeah this analogy doesn't make sense to me. My dad has seen head gaskets fail on multiple previous cars of his

> Your analogy breaks down pretty fast, though > Yeah this analogy doesn't make sense to me. My dad has seen head gaskets fail on multiple previous cars of his. Each time, the labour cost to replace the head gasket (a fairly cheap part) exceeded the value of the car, so he sold it to a scrapyard instead of ordering the repair. The key word there is labour. I change my own headgaskets. Giving up a Sunday (which is not worth money to me) to replace the head gasket is analogous to me giving up a Sunday to track down and fix a software annoyance to me (yes, I've committed fixes to a few open source projects). So the analogy does sorta fit, for opensource anyway.