Once upon a time, Jon Lewis <jlewis@lewis.org> said:
This may have been an anomaly made possible by early .com $, but I'm pretty sure at one point, companies like VA Research / VA Linux employed developers who in various cases worked part or full time on the Linux kernel and other Open Source projects "as their job".
The vast majority of developers of software in a typical Linux distribution are paid to work on it. That's what companies like Red Hat, Canonical, SuSE, and many others do. There's lots of other stuff that's contributed to as a consequence of their job. When I needed software to support DEC Unix features for example (because that's what my company used), I wrote patches and submitted them to OpenSSH, BIND, etc. My company was fine with that (we weren't going to sell software). -- Chris Adams <cma@cmadams.net>