Would You Do It Again For Free?
One of the things about the open source community that continues to baffle those non-open source people is, "why do you do it?" Open source developers work on open source software for a number of reasons from scratching an itch to gaining a reputation to building a resume to contributing to a good cause. The interesting problem comes when money enters into the equation. Research shows that when someone works on something for free (for internal rewards), those internal rewards are replaced if you start paying them. Then if you stop paying them, they will stop working on it.
Does that hold true for open source software? Are commercial companies killing open source by paying people to work on it? How should commercial companies work with the open source software community?