OSS-Fuzz: Five months later, and rewarding projects

Pride matters. Key people at Apache fought to make this possible, it is embarrassing for them to say "Oh, everybody else was right, we're the wrong entity to own this project, we haven't been able to make it work, everything transpired as we were told it would, our mistake". So they're damned if they'll do that.

You will see this at for-profit corporations too. Consider Symantec right now. Senior executives at the company responded to problems in 2015 by throwing an employee under the bus. "Bad apple" Symantec management seemed to say, shrugging, "what can you do?" to which the answer is "Provide sufficient oversight, that's what you're paid for". In 2017 with yet more problems discovered they have realised that more human sacrifices won't get the job done, and tried putting money on the table, giving up some trifling contracts with third parties and blaming the third parties for their problems. This did not go over as well as they seem to have hoped. But none of the multi-millionaire executives appear to have considered that maybe they're the problem. That's not a thought which has crossed their minds. Nobody being paid tens of millions of dollars wants to believe it's for any reason other than their superb leadership and blameless execution of the task at hand. And so Symantec sleep-walks into millions of dollars more write-offs and failures, none of which their annual report will correctly blame on the well-paid executive team. It will be declared a mystery, the unpredictable operation of unknowable markets, and not a result of management incompetence at all.