> Economics is about incentives. The basic assumption he's making is that money (or lack thereof) is an incentive for producing open source software. Not at al

> Economics is about incentives. The basic assumption he's making is that money (or lack thereof) is an incentive for producing open source software. Not at all. Economics is about "how to best allocate scarce resources". "Resources" for an open source project translate to manpower or developer hours. Given that you develop primarily for fun and learning: Would you rather spend this week making the 17th version of the same hardware driver (because the latest Linux core version broke it), or would you rather spend that time on attacking a new problem? The economic argument is simply that if a) making Linux backwards compatible takes x developer hours b) updating every Linux driver in existence takes 1000x developer hours (summed over all developers) then choosing b) is a net loss for Linux, since all those extra developer hours could be spent on something more interesting.