I think this question has a fundamentally incorrect assumption. The idea is that only products and companies built by salaried employees can succeed. However, almost every major tech company today is evidence against that fact: Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Google...and on and on. Some of these literally did start out as guys in their basement...no joke.

On the other side of things, we have countless examples of products built by salaried employees that were shut down by their companies. For example, there are fulltime paid members of the Angular team...and yet Angular 1 is planned for obsolescence despite that it is still the most popular framework today. Why? Because Angular 1 doesn't align with the internal goals of the Green Team team that creates it. Another example from recent news is Facebook's shutdown of Parse. Those were full-time paid employees working on that. Yet, it was shutdown. My guess here...it didn't align with the business goals of Facebook.

The key to success is the symbiotic relationship between a company and its customers. The customers have a problem and the company solves it. That helps the customer's business to survive. Then the company needs to address the continuing needs of the customer to enable the company to survive. It's about partnering together. This is the best way for open source to work too. When the company has no dependency on the customers...can it really meet the customer's need? Does it have a business reason to even try? I think the obvious answer is no.

If you are wondering about corporate structure. Durandal Inc. is a Delaware C Corporation. Currently, there are 10 million shares of common stock. There are three founders: a CEO (me), a CDO (Scott) and our Services Architect (Patrick) Equity, payment and benefits are provided in various degrees to our three founders and members of our core team, listed on the Aurelia web site's team page. We are globally distributed and work in much the same way as Wordpress, from a business perspective. We also have a network of official consulting and training partners. Durandal Inc. has a business plan, both for the long term and the short term. We are about solving real problems and partnering with companies to help their businesses succeed. That's something that almost no other framework can offer.