That's laying it on a bit thick. Linus is reportedly worth $40m+ — he's not living as a Stallman-like ascetic, refusing all compensation for his labors.
Would he still be actively working on Linux 26 years later if it had never become popular enough for him to significantly monetize?
I can't read his mind of course, but most open-source founders below the "companies pay you big bucks to work/consult on it" level do end up burning out and abandoning/leaving the project or taking a reduced role after a while. And of course even if he wanted to he couldn't have worked on it full-time, for obvious reasons.
That's of course not to say he hasn't done an amazing job on Linux, or that he doesn't deserve particular praise for the first few years when he really was giving away his best work to the world for free.
>That's laying it on a bit thick. Linus is reportedly worth $40m+ — he's not living as a Stallman-like ascetic, refusing all compensation for his labors.
So? Who said he was ascetic (or should be)? What we said is that he gave the world his work for free.
And while he might be worth "$40m+" the Linux industry he helped create and spearheaded is worth tens of billions (if not hundreds). Heck, Git products alone should be close to a billion.
He could have easily gone for a slice of that pie early on, create branded proprietary lines of his software, etc, and it would have been a different landscape.
Would he still be actively working on Linux 26 years later if it had never become popular enough for him to significantly monetize?
I can't read his mind of course, but most open-source founders below the "companies pay you big bucks to work/consult on it" level do end up burning out and abandoning/leaving the project or taking a reduced role after a while. And of course even if he wanted to he couldn't have worked on it full-time, for obvious reasons.
That's of course not to say he hasn't done an amazing job on Linux, or that he doesn't deserve particular praise for the first few years when he really was giving away his best work to the world for free.