Someone who wants new software to be developed that doesn't exist yet. (Or improvements to existing software that don't exist yet). Developer/Designer/QA/PM/Wh

Someone who wants new software to be developed that doesn't exist yet. (Or improvements to existing software that don't exist yet). Developer/Designer/QA/PM/Whatever time is the thing that actually has meaningful cost here, not the act of sending bits across a wire. So that's the thing that the market should be paying for. The difference with proprietary software is just that you can get people to pay for those man hours after release time - in OSS you don't have that luxury, and pretending that you do, or that you're actually fundamentally charging for something else is a mistake.