> Those are the exception, not the rule. Most open source projects are some guy's hobby, done for free in their free time. And most proprietary software become

> Those are the exception, not the rule. Most open source projects are some guy's hobby, done for free in their free time. And most proprietary software becomes completely unavailable when the company making it goes out of business. At least with the open source software, if there is interest in it, someone else can pick it up, if the original creator stops maintaining it. > a large portion of programming jobs have devolved to gluing together a bunch of open-source libraries, doing the boring gruntwork to actually make them work, and dealing with the inevitable hell, caused by using 500 components that were never designed to work together. And you think that would be any different without open source? A large portion of programming would still be gluing together a bunch of components, but instead of open source libraries you would have proprietary libraries, where if the documentation is inadequate or wrong, you have no option of looking at the source code to see what it actually does. Or in-house libraries that were designed for some specific purpose that doesn't match yours at all, and are very low quality, because they were made under a tight deadline, and no one ever went back to pay the tech debt after the MVP was released. Or maybe instead of a library you make API calls to some SaaS with no SLA and barely any documentation.