What is OSS nobility  and why you stress the fact of stratification of Linux community ?

"The selfish life of the activist
can only be understood
by the selfishness of the artist."

Sarah Dougher in "What She'd Trade"
(quoted from Feed interview)

OSS nobility is a group of people who became rich during the first, most profitable wave of the Linux gold rush (both Torvalds and ESR belong to this selected group).

And like is the case with any nobility the interests of this group can be different from the interests of rank and file members of the community. As a large stock holders they are really interested in commercial success of Linux and that became a top priority of this group whether they want it or not. If that had required adding SMP to the kernel, so be it.  Although Linus Torvalds initially had objections to the idea (he considered Linux as more viable as a desktop), he no longer can withstand the pressure and now we have SMP. Moreover SMP became a point of differentiation between Free/Open BSD and Linux.

I see several other problems in this stratification of the movement.  For those who do not belong to OSS nobility with fat salaries or stock options or both, the dilemma is that  either you exhaust yourself in the long race trying to satisfy (often unrealistic) demands of the commercial marketplace in which other (not you) are competing (and to certain extent using you as a slave), or you might be viewed as a traitor of the movement. Money tend to divide people and from that point of view I would like to classify OSS developers into five partially overlapping groups:

• OSS nobility -- rich and very rich developers, who often are co-owners of Linux companies and over one million in stock(s). This group also  includes at least one evangelist ;-)
• Paid staff of companies that are involved with OSS (Corel, Red Hat, VA Linux, etc.): those people are paid (sometimes very nicely and often have stock options) to work on OSS software. Some of them work full-time, some part-time but all of them receive monetary compensation for their contributions. Many of these people have high informal status in OSS community (for example Alan Cox).
• Unpaid volunteers that got some stock.
• Unpaid volunteers that got no stock.  They are motivated for various reasons, including pure altruism, the desire to gain name recognition or experience for a "Real Job," or a simple desire to be part of the open source community. These include some people, who put considerable daily time working on the project at the expense of their daily jobs, sleep, family of all of the above.  There is no free lunch and volunteers who spend more than a nominal part of their daily time on OSS make some (sometimes significant) sacrifices.
• Casual contributors, who for various reasons make a contribution to one or more open source product. This group includes people writing documentation, submitting occasional patches, etc.

The history teaches us that the first  thing that happens in such a setting where everyone is treated equally but some are more equal that others, is brain-drain. Russia saw it happen as every other large scale foray into collectivism have seen.  Can this happen with OSS developers ?