a) a bunch of those commercially supported Foss projects still started out as a personal project of one of a small handful of programmers that then got popular and exploded.
b) more importantly yes, a lot of commercially useful FOSS is developed by paid developers working at tech companies as part of their line of work, stuff like browsers, languages, frameworks, packages, etc. but a lot of the most iconic and beloved consumer facing FOSS applications are not, as at that point if theyre non exploitative then there’s no reason for a corporation to support or build on them. Corporations prefer to support Foss infrastructure that’s so general they can still use it to build closed exploitative projects.
Yes, but I would point out that:
a) a bunch of those commercially supported Foss projects still started out as a personal project of one of a small handful of programmers that then got popular and exploded.
b) more importantly yes, a lot of commercially useful FOSS is developed by paid developers working at tech companies as part of their line of work, stuff like browsers, languages, frameworks, packages, etc. but a lot of the most iconic and beloved consumer facing FOSS applications are not, as at that point if theyre non exploitative then there’s no reason for a corporation to support or build on them. Corporations prefer to support Foss infrastructure that’s so general they can still use it to build closed exploitative projects.