Why is so much of the internet’s infrastructure run by volunteers?

A DECADE AGO someone realised that the locks keeping swathes of the internet secure were not working. OpenSSL, a tool used to encrypt anything from social-media passwords to e-commerce purchases, had a fatal flaw that made the information it was supposed to protect visible to potential hackers. The discovery was unsurprising to anyone who knew about the team behind OpenSSL. The software, used by almost 20% of websites—including tech companies making billions of dollars in annual profits—was largely run by two men named Steve, who worked on it in their spare time. Comments on the code contained admissions of potential weaknesses, such as “EEK! Experimental code starts.”