Fair enough - my complaint is a bit too compressed. The point here is that my experience at Intel led me to realize that corporate OSS users will take your library in secret and not even tell you - much less publicly acknowledge it, much less contribute or help support it. Obviously I'm not expecting to be paid extra while at Intel because folks are using a library.

It's just rather discouraging from the perspective of working on anything else OSS as an independent developer - unless it's a pure passion project. Given that the stuff I'm interested in often tends to wind up being hauled into high-performance infrastructure that's kind of important to bigcos, it's a bit depressing.

The whole multiple contributors thing is a great theory and works for some high-gloss, high-profile projects. There's a huge tail of OSS where the expertise just isn't there and most companies just want to free ride.