I attended the talk covered in this article, and someone actually asked him a similar question there. His reply this time is that, personally, he had never mad

I attended the talk covered in this article, and someone actually asked him a similar question there. His reply this time is that, personally, he had never made more money in his life than when companies paid him to fix or improve open source software. And I can see his point! It may not be common, but there certainly plenty of organizations that either have business interests aligned with open source technology (e.g. 10gen, MySQL AB), have open source ingrained into their culture (e.g. Wikimedia Foundation, Mozilla), provide consulting/training services around open source (e.g. DataStax, Elastic Search, LucidWorks), or simply use open source so heavily that they need to pay people to improve it (e.g. Intel, Google). And then, there are plenty of companies (like mine, http://parse.ly http://parse.ly) that take the business perspective that anything that isn't core to our business / competitive advantage not only can, but should, be open source, eventually. Getting a job working on open source isn't some fringe thing anymore. If it feels that way because your employer doesn't allow open source work, you may want to get the heck out :)