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I am a strong supporter of Free Software and am a "card" carrying member of the FSF. I think considering the popularity and widespread adoption of many open source and Free software such as Hibernate, Jakarta et al there should be a way in which the talented programmers who are behind these activities are recognized and rewarded.
Of course some of them do get book deals and maybe consultancy engagements etc., but that is not sufficient and widespread enough.
Just as there are different licensing schemes for effective distribution of these open source and free software there should be some way of compensating their creators. I work for a company that produces Open Source and Free software: we build custom business applications for our clients and give away our entire source code without any licenses attached to it.
We are compensated by either an hourly rate or by a fixed price paid for the entire development process. We dont lock the customer into a perpetual maintenance contract, nor do we discourage them from modifying or distributing the source code. The software we build are predominantly standards based. The tools we use are not all open source software however: we use commercially available products which we buy in the market or get at discounted rates from our vendor partnerships and then build our solutions.
Now I realize that what I have described above is not the same as the model that Open Source Software development normally follows, but the question is: why shouldnt it follow the above model? After all the programmers who contribute their time, money, and expertise in building high quality products such as Tomcat, Jasper, Apache, Hibernate etc., should also be able to live. Of course Hibernate has now joined the JBoss group and hopefully its creators are compensated for their excellent work.
But companies that use the products developed by these groups should have some way of paying them back. Professional Open Source as espoused by JBoss should become more widespread and benefit the rest of the community. We should have a model wherein the quarterly pressures and margins dont drive our lives. I am positive that there are legions of enormously talented programmers who are working in commercial sectors producing closed source and non-free software who would be able to unleash their creative talent in the open source area if provided the right incentive. The only reason why they are not able to do it is because they are forced to work in whatever job they are in currently because of economic reasons.
If there is a mechanism to compensate the entrants into any Open Source project community: I think it will be a big boost to the movement. Thus there should be both these factors: a programmer should have an itch that he wants to scratch, and there is a financial incentive for him to do the scratching. What better way to set a Development Project underway?
In other words we all should be paid to have fun. Is there anything wrong with this approach? Maybe I am just an impractical idealist - but hey, atleast I can dream.
