Major projects has corporate sponsors or academic sponsors. A lot of open source is done and paid for by companies. For that matter, even free for open source hosting services have bills that needs to be paid - by companies (github, google).
Linux Torwalds and linux maintenners are paid - which is a good thing btwm
This reads like an attempt to justify not contributing himself. I read the same thing from sales guys all the time trying to draw analogies between sales guys and engineers. If only projects could run on blog posts and lightning talks...
FWIW I maintain multiple open source projects and a free CDN service for developers that use Bootstrap & Font Awesome. To me, a contribution is not limited to code and never should be. If it makes the FOSS community thrive, then that is a contribution.
If you've never lived on freenode or one of the other support networks the community that develops open source is often very remote from the people that end up 'supporting' it. People sharing expertise is why databases like MySQL and Postgres win for all sorts of people, and there are many ways to provide this support that has nothing to do with contributing code.
A great example is melpa and marmalade for emacs. The difference between having a package manager and not having a package manager has transformed the open source project but all they are doing is mirroring a bunch of elisp.
Sometimes just providing the infrastructure to make a project available is the only reason why the project is popular. npm anyone?
I believe that free software advocates are more likely to last long than open source ones (ie, they don't get bored speaking software freedom, and less tolerant to non-free things).
Most open source people are okay with using a few (or more) proprietary software (Binary blobs in kernel?). They don't have any strong motive (there are not ethics or moral) to keep everything "open source" as do the free software people.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 46.9 ms ] threadsomeone else = contributors
everyone who is not = mainly corporations
Linux Torwalds and linux maintenners are paid - which is a good thing btwm
This is my gut feeling too.
A great example is melpa and marmalade for emacs. The difference between having a package manager and not having a package manager has transformed the open source project but all they are doing is mirroring a bunch of elisp.
Sometimes just providing the infrastructure to make a project available is the only reason why the project is popular. npm anyone?
Most open source people are okay with using a few (or more) proprietary software (Binary blobs in kernel?). They don't have any strong motive (there are not ethics or moral) to keep everything "open source" as do the free software people.