It's all well and good having a "pure" open source project; but at some point things become too big for someone to run in their spare time. Really, it should b

It's all well and good having a "pure" open source project; but at some point things become too big for someone to run in their spare time. Really, it should be about having proper project governance. If a project is big enough, there should be some sort of board of directors with a combination of technical people and some representation from the user community, which is where I see "community managers" fitting in. Like it or not, the companies these community managers often represent ARE users of the product, and often provide funding to support open source projects. IMO, funding open source projects should absolutely get you "special treatment" because it incentivizes companies to support open source projects financially (see OpenSSL for what happens when they don't.) Apache seems to run this model the best; but there are a lot of projects under their umbrella and some are run better than others. And it still depends heavily on the management skills of the project leads; but that seems to be what the development community wants.