No I’m not. But it is what motivates people at a large scale.
There are very few open source contributors that are actually really good. The nature of software means that their labor of love can scale very well.
Additionally, there is nearly zero barrier to being an open source developer. Buy a laptop and start writing code.
So open source only works well because when you get lucky and get a combination of a motivated contributor and essentially zero distribution cost, a single group can ship to billions of people.
If we want someone making an artificial heart, it’s a completely different story. The research and development is very capital intensive so you need a war chest to even start tinkering. Then once you have something you want to try to get approved, you need either to be a medical doctor or employ one, which is a huge opportunity cost for a medical school debt ridden doctor.
All of the capital needed to fund this is high risk so it needs a high upside return if private investors are involved.
Now a founder could eschew all of their equity, but after going through all of the work to do this capital raising it would be quite unusual.
We can't ignore the influence of money even on open source, though. How many people are contributing in an anonymous manner, so they can't claim financial benefits from publicity and networking? How many open source projects are rejecting VC funding?
