It's really hard to make money from these projects. Hence going back for employment. Either they succeed as a startup, or they are worthless. Building on contract is a tough business also. Software is great if it works and goes viral because it costs so little to scale Software. But otherwise lines and lines of code are pretty much worthless aside from learning experiences.

I did have 9 years working in a medium sized NASDAQ trade company doing firmware (C). It's not OO, but definitely team based development there. I think my problem is still to have interviews be focused on these projects. I don't mind if they grill me on the details of them to demonstrate what kind of person I am. But more often than not it's about standard behavioural and algorithmic puzzles.