I agree my view is cynical. Maybe that's because I cannot find anything
romantic or poetic in "financing, regulatory constraints, product
schedules, commitments, staffing issues, and everything else that isn't
coding".
How would you have ever seen Unix had it not been for financing (engineers, even passionate ones, kind of like to eat and have a roof over their heads)? Without regulatory constraints (while not perfect), applying Unix to anything that is safety critical (lives directly on the line) would be a disaster. I can make a similar statement for every single thing in that list which isn't coding.
There are something like 28 million public repositories on Github. How many of them are abandoned (no commitment)? How many of them are "beautiful" (for any reasonable definition of "beautiful" you can come up with)? Even 1%? Of those, how many of them have corporate backing (money, financing, staffing, etc.)?
It's fine to romanticize passion. But it is also fiction.
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