Comment by mike_hearn

Sure, but the only reason Linux wifi drivers are open source is that Linux was born at the start of the GNU movement and Linus picked the GPL. If he had picked a BSD license, or LGPL for drivers, then people would still get paid to write them but they wouldn't be open source. What you see nowadays is that the GPL is long since abandoned, I don't remember the last time I encountered an open source project that was GPL outside of the few big ones that survive from the 90s.

With respect to maintainers getting old, I guess your example is kind of on point. It used to be driven by ideology or the practical desire for a home UNIX. That motivated people to spend the long evenings alone working it out. Now it's driven by building a Twitch audience, and the hobbyist was even getting help!

I guess with respect to stealing Linux's thunder, I feel like that happened 20 years ago already. When MacOS X came out there was a long stream of people 'defecting' to it from the Linux community. It separated those who just wanted UNIX from those who had the ideology and a lot of the energy dissipated from Linux at that time.