[chubot]

Very good list. I would add that most open source projects have many people working on them.

So suppose you actually manage get paid despite all that -- how do you distribute money fairly? This is a huge problem can could actually slow the project down by leading to hurt feelings. Ironically, it's almost better for the group if nobody gets paid.

Corporations have evolved all sorts of imperfect systems to solve this problem, but it comes at a tremendous cost (performance reviews, interviews, firing, all of HR essentially).

But the open source model of collaboration follows the principle of "least bureaucracy". It throws out all these "coordination costs" in the name of just getting the job done. No more and no less.

[Mz]

it's almost better for the group if nobody gets paid.

Relatedly: Studies show that paying people zero money and giving them respect gets better results than paying some pittance well below market rate. The study conclusion was to the effect of "Pay enough (market rates) or pay nothing. Don't pay some pittance because it is all your project can afford."

[antaviana]

We used to have a freeware product that a few years after became a commercial product sold as a subscription.

When it was a freeware product, several people wanted to donate but we never accepted any donation, just to avoid the feeling of getting paid too low. Also I guess we were a bit equalitarian: we wanted that either nobody paid or that everybody paid.

[simplehuman]

How did your existing customers react to it (switch bait?)

[antaviana]

In general quite well. It is a B2B product and being able to pay gives them some assurance that there will be someone behind. The freeware version continued to exist, and the transition to actually pay was long (free beta for the subscription lasted 4 months). We also did a heavily discounted launch promotion so that the transition from nothing to something was a lot smoother for existing users. Here is the announcement we did: http://www.apsic.com/blog/?p=25

[bbcbasic]

Good opportunity to make their donations go to a charity. They can feel twice as good!

[Theodores]

Let's take a musical analogy - a 'group' group. With a four piece popular beat combo the royalties go four ways, it is all viable as a business. With a larger collective or an orchestra the money gets a bit tight - it goes forty rather than four ways.

But, this is something my internal dialogue says whenever I hear a musician talking about money (and where there share is...) - 'But you are in it for the music, right?'

This musicians seem to forget, they become businessmen and think the value is in the magic of their work and they should be paid for it. I wish they kept music as a fun thing rather than something they 'only do if paid' and for them to see hiring venues and doing tours and selling merchandise as what they need to do for money.

So, analogy is different to reality, however, we must remember why we do stuff for Open Source. Instead of looking for T-shirts and venue tickets to sell, we need to have real world needs for the Open Source code, to work on those problems and get paid for them using and contributing as required to the FOSS projects. As for expectation for pay from the FOSS project (rather than the day job) it should be 'you're in it for the love of music, right?'

[chubot]

Are you actually arguing that musicians should be into it only for the music and not get paid? If so I completely disagree and that's not my point at all. Musicians absolutely should be paid.

Software authors should also be paid. I'm just pointing out that there are some practical problems with it in the open source setting.

My ideal would be that essentially all software is open source, but everyone would also get paid. But I realize there are many reasons why we don't have that situation today.

[Mz]

The problem comes in when people expect professional level music, but insist that musicians should all do it for love while also supporting themselves with a day job. Professional level anything takes significant time and effort. If it has value to others, people should not object to the person providing that value capturing some of it so they can keep a roof over their head.

Sometimes, the answers aren't as simple and easy as we wish they were.

[Arizhel]

Professional musicians these days earn their living by going on tour and selling concert tickets and merchandise (esp. T-shirts). The biggest ones are quite profitable, and the concert ticket prices I've seen lately are rather high ($50 to sit on the lawn, $200+ for seats, for one big concert in my area).

The problem is getting to that level where you have so many fans that you can fill an arena or even a smaller venue.

[Mz]

It was a metaphor. It wasn't intended literally. The actual discussion here is about monetizing open source.

[dasmoth]

Very good list. I would add that most open source projects have many people working on them.

I'm almost positive this isn't true. If you restrict to the top few percent of projects, it'll be much more true, but even so I think you'll find a lot of projects with relatively small core groups, and sometimes a single hacker who wrote most of the core.

Weekend project: try to quantify this via GitHub APIs? Although suspect that might still give a somewhat skewed picture (not every major project is on GitHub...)

[chubot]

Yeah I'm sure that's true if you count by the number of projects. But if you count by utility to the world, I'm sure it's not true.

Think of every open source OS, browser, compiler, interpreter, etc.

There might be one person who initiated the project and did much of the design, like Guido van Rossum for Python, but it wouldn't be fair if he got 100% of the compensation and everybody else on python-dev got 0%.