[archagon]

It's unbalanced. There's really no good reason why management should be getting orders of magnitude more profits than the employees just for being there first.

I think the cooperative model[1] should really be the natural order of things. Too bad it's not very common, especially in software.

[1]: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative

[TillE]

In this case, "management" (ie, Markus and one or two others) has done 95% of the work of making and selling a hugely successful product. Everyone else was brought on later for support and maintenance.

People are talking about startups, but this is nothing remotely like a typical startup scenario.

[archagon]

They made the initial product, but it sounds like they hadn't done much of the work in a few years.

And 5% of billions would still be a lot.