> These last paragraphs just made me realise how grateful I am to people who work on these open source projects without expecting any compensation or even praise for their work.
I think it's reasonable to expect both, even if indirectly. Participating in a well-organized open source project confers extremely rich experience, and employers do take notice. In my company, the folks who spent time in the community generally noticeably out-perform the ones who grew up exclusively in industry (which should trouble industry) at similar years of experience. If you want to end up highly-compensated, it's a great way to spend your time.
The real challenge for the open source community is how hard it still is to make a living sticking to the original open source work, instead of taking your talent and leaving one day. Wine is one of a few exceptions with some companies in its ecosystem, but generally speaking there's not enough upstream-work jobs for a lot of important open source software infrastructure.
I think it's reasonable to expect both, even if indirectly. Participating in a well-organized open source project confers extremely rich experience, and employers do take notice. In my company, the folks who spent time in the community generally noticeably out-perform the ones who grew up exclusively in industry (which should trouble industry) at similar years of experience. If you want to end up highly-compensated, it's a great way to spend your time.
The real challenge for the open source community is how hard it still is to make a living sticking to the original open source work, instead of taking your talent and leaving one day. Wine is one of a few exceptions with some companies in its ecosystem, but generally speaking there's not enough upstream-work jobs for a lot of important open source software infrastructure.