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Comment by alexvitkov | Hacker News Reader

A scary amount of critical FOSS projects are just some guy's hobby, and a hobbyist will often work on problems they find interesting, regardless of whether or not they're important for the "community".

If you're coming home from work and have one hour of free time, do you really want to spend it investigating why a Meta+Shift+F11 doesn't work in your program under Wayland on Womperloo Linux 11.4?

That's the #1 reason why people need to be paid to work on important software. In a corporate environment (with somewhat reasonable management) boring but important work will land in someone's Jira ticket and they'll be paid to get it done.

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OH, trust me - corporate environments are not at all conducive to making sure bugs get fixed for Womperloo 11.4 users. Corporate environments incentivize working on flashy, highly visible work. Bugfixing edge cases is the opposite of that, and usually falls by the wayside (unless it's the kind of company where quality is a metric that is enforced, which is rare).

The flipside of open source maintainers being unpaid (or, at least, their pay not being linked to their output) is that they have time to care deeply about quality, and many really do. Linus Torvalds is not going to sit idly by while an update is shipped out that breaks Womperloo, I'll tell you that.

> OH, trust me - corporate environments are not at all conducive to making sure bugs get fixed for Womperloo 11.4 users.

That's true, but Meta+Shift+F11 will usually be fixed if it breaks on Windows, and ironically will very likely work Womperloo 11.4 as well, because Wine basically runs all Windows software that doesn't make it an explicit goal not to run under Wine perfectly.

> Linus Torvalds is not going to sit idly by while an update is shipped out that breaks Womperloo, I'll tell you that.

Linux is a great example - it's the most arguably the most successful FOSS project, and that's no small part due to the fact that Linus, as well as a ton of other programmers get paid a lot of money to work on it.

https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ makes a good point that the really only stable ABI on Linux is WIN32, especially if you step an inch off the "we have the source and build from it every time" train.

Linus keeps the kernel ABI as stable as he can, but that's only a small part of Linux.

I would argue that he cared deeply about quality long before he was ever making money from Linux. But we're splitting hairs over a tangential argument at this point.

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