This is a testament to how we can get lost in the weeds with ideas. The economic reality is that there’s little money in open source, on an hourly pay basis. There’s no barrier to entry, put in the hours and you can have a reason to work in all your spare time too. It’s silly to compare how people treat positions of real economic power to them.

The leadership of large open sourcr projects do carry real economic power. WordPress and Ruby have real significant impact, Mastodon less so.