@qwertziop I mean, sort of, but it's also just life. There's excitement in building a new compression library, getting early adopters, and getting praise from the community. There's no excitement in 20-30 years' worth of fixing portability issues and fielding weird requests from users with extremely fringe use cases.

My point is, it breaks the same way in open source (where you don't always get paid) and in the world of Big Tech (where you do). And I don't think that allocating money differently can change this. Ultimately, most people want variety and want to relive that thrill of being on the cutting edge every now and then.