Buster Neece is not highly employable because he worked on an open source project - he is highly employable because he worked as a programmer in Bravely Blue Media before "retiring" to work full time on open source.
The thing about this profession, is that it's hard to get your first job, but once you're in - everyone will want to hire you. Neece was in, and even if currently he is technically "out" - potential employers will still want to hire him if he ever decides he wants to code for a salary again.
Learned Fortran on an old TI-99; forgot Fortran; learned to draw, paint, sculpt, and play violin; learned how to merge code and art, turned it into my UX/Front-end dev Frankenthing.
That's just it, isn't it? If all you have is Open Source as something you can show an employer, but you still have a decade or more of rejections from employers and still no initial job.
Again, the current incentive for companies is 'take what you want for free, because actually paying for free code cuts into profits and shareholders don't like that sort of thing'.
I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
Wait, I have a bit of a sticky with "If all you have is Open Source as something you can show an employer".
Open source is all you can show an employer. Everything else is hearsay. You can say, "I worked on the doohickey that tamped down vibrations in the flux capacitor" if you want, but unless you have permission to show your work, it's just words. Sure, you can back it up in an interview, but you can do the same if it was open source.
Having open source software you can show people is always of benefit to the company looking to recruit you. Of course, if it's crap then you're not going to get far, but...
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Buster Neece is not highly employable because he worked on an open source project - he is highly employable because he worked as a programmer in Bravely Blue Media before "retiring" to work full time on open source.
The thing about this profession, is that it's hard to get your first job, but once you're in - everyone will want to hire you. Neece was in, and even if currently he is technically "out" - potential employers will still want to hire him if he ever decides he wants to code for a salary again.
That's just it, isn't it? If all you have is Open Source as something you can show an employer, but you still have a decade or more of rejections from employers and still no initial job.
Again, the current incentive for companies is 'take what you want for free, because actually paying for free code cuts into profits and shareholders don't like that sort of thing'.
Employable =/= employed
I have a bit of a long reply for that, so I wrote it as another direct comment to the main post - dev.to/idanarye/comment/gck9
Wait, I have a bit of a sticky with "If all you have is Open Source as something you can show an employer".
Open source is all you can show an employer. Everything else is hearsay. You can say, "I worked on the doohickey that tamped down vibrations in the flux capacitor" if you want, but unless you have permission to show your work, it's just words. Sure, you can back it up in an interview, but you can do the same if it was open source.
Having open source software you can show people is always of benefit to the company looking to recruit you. Of course, if it's crap then you're not going to get far, but...