I somewhat agree with TFA, but I think it fails to consider that there are (at least) two different types of open source project: 1. Rails, nginx and other stu

I somewhat agree with TFA, but I think it fails to consider that there are (at least) two different types of open source project: 1. Rails, nginx and other stuff that is used by developers generally has a higher chance of getting useful contributions and institutional support. People use this stuff professionally, if they run into a limitation, they contribute back for pragmatic reasons. 2. Firefox, Ubuntu and other open source consumer products are pretty hard to do with nothing but unpaid volunteers. Some projects pull it off (KDE comes to mind, although several distributions employ devs to work on it), but in general it seems pretty hard: Even if you find enough skilled developers, what about UX? What about design? What about marketing? What about PR? Would Firefox have made it in 2004 without the NYT ad?