I always wonder how much of the most popular open source projects are written by people who are actually being paid for the work by their employers
Many of my open source contributions came from fixing bugs or adding features because I needed them for my job. Many of the biggest open source projects I use come from big companies that have full-time engineers working on them.
I’ve also worked at two separate companies that have hired developers of very popular open-source projects. It didn’t work out in either case because the company wanted them to prioritize work related to the company, but they wanted to continue focusing on the community as before.
On a micro level, it’s surprisingly difficult to arrange to pay someone outside of a company to work on a project for you. The amount of overhead that goes into arranging the contracting agreement, communicating the issue, setting up the contractor with your environment, and managing it all can quickly snowball into a massive commitment for even small work. The exception is hiring contractors or contracting companies who have made a business out of working in that exact domain and are already up to speed on the project and have good relationships with upstream maintainers, but those are rare.
Conversely, on the receiving end, if you aren't somebody who's made a business out of being a contractor then taking some company's money to do a specific piece of work also seems like too much hassle and overhead to be worth it...
Many of my open source contributions came from fixing bugs or adding features because I needed them for my job. Many of the biggest open source projects I use come from big companies that have full-time engineers working on them.
I’ve also worked at two separate companies that have hired developers of very popular open-source projects. It didn’t work out in either case because the company wanted them to prioritize work related to the company, but they wanted to continue focusing on the community as before.
On a micro level, it’s surprisingly difficult to arrange to pay someone outside of a company to work on a project for you. The amount of overhead that goes into arranging the contracting agreement, communicating the issue, setting up the contractor with your environment, and managing it all can quickly snowball into a massive commitment for even small work. The exception is hiring contractors or contracting companies who have made a business out of working in that exact domain and are already up to speed on the project and have good relationships with upstream maintainers, but those are rare.