I'm surprised by the amount of negativity in this thread. I was initially going to say that writing a working, solid, free kernel was akin to climbing Everest in terms of human achievement. After the first guy does it, does it really diminish the others' contributions? If they do it using a micro-kernel, isn't that kind of like climbing the mountain without oxygen? But given the amount of community effort that is required it's really a lot bigger than the Everest analogy. Maybe it's more like space travel.
Regardless, I feel like these devs are working towards something worthwhile, even if only they benefit from the experience (as they imply in the article, they've already directly benefited from their free work, good for them!). Is there some sort of opportunity cost that I'm not aware of here? Could we say that they should be working on developing a driver for the latest Nvidia graphics card for the Linux kernel instead? Would more people benefit from that? In the next sixty months, probably, in the next sixty years, it's a lot harder to say...
Regardless, I feel like these devs are working towards something worthwhile, even if only they benefit from the experience (as they imply in the article, they've already directly benefited from their free work, good for them!). Is there some sort of opportunity cost that I'm not aware of here? Could we say that they should be working on developing a driver for the latest Nvidia graphics card for the Linux kernel instead? Would more people benefit from that? In the next sixty months, probably, in the next sixty years, it's a lot harder to say...