[ghjm]

The question here is what motivates individual developers to write big projects and then release them as open source. I think vague dreams of million-dollar deals are part of this for a lot of people. As the developer community becomes more aware of what a grind open source maintainership is, people are already less interested in taking on that responsibility. If we also prevent big money buyouts from happening, I wonder what's left to motivate a future developer to create the next redis.

[stephenr]

Redis was created for the same reason most of us create open source tools: to scratch an itch, to solve a problem (or improve a solution).

I find it hard to believe many if any would see "create an open source tool" as a method to become a millionaire.