I know that many people have difficulty wrapping their minds around the fact that open source software exists and continues to flourish. (I often have difficult believing this as well.) I mean when you think about it, how can thousands of people be writing software for free that rivals and sometimes exceeds the software that you have to pay for? I mean these people are often doing this work without compensation and yet they continue to turn out great software.
If you have a few minutes (and I realize few of us do these days) and are interested in seeing one aspect of how open source survives read this article about open source projects that are helped along by commercial companies.
Companies will sometimes sponsor open source coding events where they bring together open source developers for a short period of time, usually with the goal of adding or improving to an open source project.
What is surprising is that these open source events can often be held for less than it would cost for a company to develop the software in-house.
But we again return to the paradox of open source software...if a company just paid to sponsor an open source event wouldn't they want to keep the code developed during that event. With open source anyone can use and modify the code...even a competitor to the company that just sponsored the event.
So we are again stuck with the wonderful mystery of how open source software continues to thrive.
Read "How to Sponsor an Open Source Sprint"
