More and more, we see open-source projects being backed by investment rounds. It's positive for the projects because they can innovate faster and sustain themselves by paying people to work on it full-time, making money one of the main drivers, and investors’ interests the wheel that steers the boat. *Is that something good or bad?* It depends.
When the motivations of the people contributing to a project are extrinsic, then the chances are that when money is gone, so are the motivations to contribute to the project. When the project is more community-driven, intrinsic motivations take preference, which helps the project sustain long-term. Note that community involvement and governance are not the same, even though they are often used interchangeably.
There’s a high correlation between projects that use money as an extrinsic motivator and the amount of marketing effort they’ve poured into them. They usually have marketing copies along the lines of *“we are making the web faster”* that reassemble the missions from Silicon Valley companies. I refrain from building anything upon those tools and frameworks no matter how good their marketing is. When I build software, I want it to sustain in time, and to achieve that, it’s important that the blocks I build it upon can sustain too.
Note that there’ll always be economic interests when developing open-source projects. Companies contribute to open-source projects because they benefit their business. However, money here is a secondary player. The community has a substantial role in steering the project than the companies that support the project through contributions. An excellent example of this is Rails. A company like Shopify has teams dedicated to contributing to Ruby and Rails. Shopify has interests, but it can't drive the framework in a direction that only benefits Shopify.
I think this is beautiful about the Ruby community, and recently in Javascript through projects like Vue, Vite, Rollup, and Svelte. You can sense a community behind it that connects all the different pieces in harmony and builds a strong community around it. This is the type of OSS that aligns with my principles and upon which I build the software that I craft.