As a revenue-generating project I was able to share the burden by paying people to work on parts of it. I think that was a more effective way than waiting for others to join in.
Note that my paying commercial customers are pharmaceutical companies, where employees must present their presentation materials to their legal department before they give a talk.
In some cases I've heard that that extends to non-trivial code changes, which reduces the number of people who can help out.
Even setting that aside, I've been working on FOSS project for 20+ years. Outside code contribution is rare, and substantial code contribution is like hen's teeth. Bear in mind that most people in my field are chemists-who-program, not software developers.
One major exception is the RDKit, which was primarily funded by in-house R&D. Open sourcing it benefited the company because 1) it was primarily pre-competitive (the internal version included competitive features not in the FOSS version), 2) it lowers the price of commercial tools in the area, and 3) the differential cost of organizing the FOSS distribution was a net benefit.
This is similar to other successful FOSS projects. However, this model implies that one must be an employee of a large company in order to work on FOSS projects. Which is not for everyone. Clearly small profitable proprietary development shops exist, so why not FOSS ones?
Note that my paying commercial customers are pharmaceutical companies, where employees must present their presentation materials to their legal department before they give a talk.
In some cases I've heard that that extends to non-trivial code changes, which reduces the number of people who can help out.
Even setting that aside, I've been working on FOSS project for 20+ years. Outside code contribution is rare, and substantial code contribution is like hen's teeth. Bear in mind that most people in my field are chemists-who-program, not software developers.
One major exception is the RDKit, which was primarily funded by in-house R&D. Open sourcing it benefited the company because 1) it was primarily pre-competitive (the internal version included competitive features not in the FOSS version), 2) it lowers the price of commercial tools in the area, and 3) the differential cost of organizing the FOSS distribution was a net benefit.
This is similar to other successful FOSS projects. However, this model implies that one must be an employee of a large company in order to work on FOSS projects. Which is not for everyone. Clearly small profitable proprietary development shops exist, so why not FOSS ones?