Cash and Community: Incentives and Open Source Development

“The open source landscape has changed dramatically in the past
10 years, and the picture of open source developers has changed as
well. Where free and open source (FOSS) projects were once
considered the domain of volunteer enthusiasts donating time to
build alternatives to proprietary software, the odds are that the
core contributors of any major project are paid developers working
for a company with an interest in the project. Whether this is a
good thing is subject to debate.

“At the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), held in July in
Portland, Oregon, a four-person panel moderated by Rob Lanphier of
the Wikimedia Foundation weighed in on financial incentives in open
source. Donald Smith of the Eclipse Foundation, Leslie Hawthorn
(formerly of Google), independent developer Todd Crowe, and Stormy
Peters of the GNOME Foundation explored some of the models for
providing financial incentives and how companies and communities
might work together. Paying vs. Passion

“A primary concern for many open source advocates is that paying
developers to work on open source undermines the ethos that drives
open source.”

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