[xasop]

Sure there'll be the occasional hobbyists but they're not really what drives open source development. In my opinion.

Too bad your opinion doesn't correlate with reality.

Yes, there are open-source projects that are backed by companies, but there are also many successful open-source projects which are primarily community-driven. Both are significant sources of development effort, and neither should be underestimated.

So what's the model really?

Valve will take a cut of games they sell via SteamOS.

Paid developers will do a significant part of the work on SteamOS. They will be paid because they are games developers who sell games on SteamOS.

I never suggested that Valve would have to do no work at all, only that they would also benefit from the work of volunteers.

Game players will buy games on SteamOS.

A very small fraction of those game players will have the wit and know-how to make changes to source code. This is a volunteer coder.

I would imagine that most players on SteamOS won't want to fix bugs, as it's a commercial product targeted at gamers. This is irrelevant as long as SteamOS is based on Debian, and people who write code on Debian run Steam.

[xasop]

Here's my experience:
The proprietary driver (legacy) was a pain to install.  Once in I found that steam games were visually faster but produced graphical glitches (flashing shadows, missing renders, etc..).
The open source drivers worked without glitches but produced noticeably visually slower rendering.  I think it was a 15fps difference. 

Sounds to me like the open-source driver is what needs optimising. The proprietary driver needs bug fixes.

I haven't actually tried the proprietary driver on my HD 6850, but I feel no need to, since the open-source one works perfectly well for my needs.

[fappenhosen]

Too bad your opinion doesn't correlate with reality.

Evidence?

Yes, there are open-source projects that are backed by companies, but there are also many successful open-source projects which are primarily community-driven.

Community != Volunteer

[xasop]

Evidence?

I could put in the effort to track down some numbers to post, but I don't care enough. Instead, I'll name a few projects that started as volunteer efforts and continue to be maintained in large part by volunteers: Linux, GNU, Debian, Apache, PHP, PostgreSQL, Xfce, Mesa (a free OpenGL implementation). Any of these sound familiar?

Community != Volunteer

Communities are typically made up of a healthy mix of paid and volunteer developers. It would be highly unusual to find one lacking in volunteer effort.

[fappenhosen]

I'll name a few projects that started as volunteer efforts and continue to be maintained in large part by volunteers:

*sigh*. You don't get it do you?

Communities are typically made up of a healthy mix of paid and volunteer developers. It would be highly unusual to find one lacking in volunteer effort.

It would be unusual to find a field without a sheep in it. Therefore all animals in fields are sheep.

[xasop]

It would be unusual to find a field without a sheep in it. Therefore all animals in fields are sheep.

Thanks for the obvious straw man. It's made it clear that you're trolling.

[fappenhosen]

Thanks for the obvious straw man. It's made it clear that you're trolling.

Meh. Whatever dude.

[jroa]

fappenhosen is a troll?  He should have a troll name or something.  Oh, wait, never mind.