[sktrdie]

But why though? Of course giving a well-payed salary to people is something great and I have nothing against it. But the whole "cool" thing about open-source is that it showed that it can do pretty amazing things without capitalism. Instead here we are trying to push the same mentality we use for everything else into open-source.

Why not continue the experiment as it has for the last 30 years (without any major economical incentives); it has only produced amazing pieces of work so far, so why risk to taint it?

[O_H_E]

That's an interesting perspective. I always had the feeling that it is unsustainable or unstable to rely on underpaid work.

[tracker1]

I suspect that a significant portion of open-source development is paid work that meets a business need, but not the business' product. I know that what little open-source contribution I've made has mostly been stuff I had to do at/for work that was easy enough to break off and have as a separate library/module.

[anon1m0us]

It's still capitalism. It works because business folks sell valuable software acquired at a zero dollar cost of goods for billions of dollars.

And there are a ton of crappy open source projects out there, so it hasn't "only produced amazing pieces of work" it's also produced amazingly terrible software that has proliferated because it's free, but the sales people don't know or care.