Am Montag 23 August 2010, 10:06:09 schrieb J.B.C.Engelen@...1578...:

For me, free software is a little bit about not getting payed.

..by the users, yes. But many OSS programmers are getting paid by OSS supporting (and using) companies.

Am Sonntag 22 August 2010, 18:11:12 schrieb Alexandre Prokoudine:

There is one tricky thing here, however. Once you have people working for money, it's important to maintain existing community of volunteers who might feel less motivated to work for free when there are people who want to works on things for money. Not many projects have such an experience, and not all projects that have it can call it positive.

I follow some KDE lists, and many KDE programmers are hired by SuSE/Trolltech/Nokia/... full-time. No problems here, also no social problems. There's the basic rule "who codes [much], decides [what he/she implements and how]" which applies in the same way to paid and unpaid developers.

Also, I have seen people being funded in the SciPy community, e.g. to work on IPython refactoring for some months, by companies/institutions interested in specific features.

In general, I would say that funding is welcomed in all cases, yet a) there needs to be someone who is willing and capable of doing the work, and b) the code needs to follow the same rules/review procedures to be accepted into the OSS project's trunk.

HTH, Hans