There's been a lot of discussion over years about open source communities, and how curating the community is an important part about that. If people aren't pai

There's been a lot of discussion over years about open source communities, and how curating the community is an important part about that. If people aren't paid in cash, they need to be paid in other things, like egoboo, kind words, gratitude, whatever. When people get mistreated while volunteering their time for open source, looking at that from an economics perspective it's every bit as bad as when a company decides it'd rather not pay its employees. It's good if programming is fun, but "fun" doesn't pay the bills, and doesn't advance your career. Reputation and contribution could though. But it's hard to fix, because the paymasters (the community) don't always care. I think in the long run, the true driver of open source is people scratching their own itch. Most I believe don't do it for altruistic reasons or even for fun, but because they use this piece of software themselves to do something productive, and need it to be better.