[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.