[gboone42]

Devs clearly thought integrating South into Core was worth shelling out for, they could have sat on their hands after the project hit it's modest 2500 pound goal but, they didn't.

Django, and all open source projects, benefit from the law of increasing returns. As more people contribute to it, with code, money, or simply by using it, the entire user base benefits. WordPress is a great example. I remember the days when WordPress was kind of wonky, but as it rose in usage and attracted more developers (and more of us started getting paid to contribute to the theme/plugin repos or Core), it quickly became stronger and oh so much more stable. There are tons of paid ("premium") plugins and themes out there now, and so many people paying for WP.com, but it's by no means a "pay for features" platform.

With Django, paying Andrew Godwin to dedicate some of his time to integrate South into Core is definitely the kind of thing all of us will benefit from whether we contributed or not, as would runserver. At £2500 (his original goal) it's not like we're paying his salary. Even with the $30,000 he raised, it's not like he's living high on the hog ℅ the django community. If someone wants to field a kickstarter for £2500 to improve runserver and people want it as badly as people wanted South integrated, it'd probably be successful. That kind of voluntary patronage hardly makes it a pay-for-features platform.