The following is controversial and ill-thought-out, so feel free to flame (I gotta learn somehow!) Nobody does things for free. We do things because we gain ei

The following is controversial and ill-thought-out, so feel free to flame (I gotta learn somehow!) Nobody does things for free. We do things because we gain either money or status or pleasure. If you want someone to work for you, and you don't want to pay them money, you have to give them either status or pleasure. One example of getting people to do things for pleasure is ad-supported social media sites. They are giving people pleasure (modulo engagement psychology) and getting their attention on ads for free. But let's focus on getting people to do things for status. PhDs are a classic example: if you get a PhD and stay in Academia, your salary is tiny relative to industry. But there is a promise of status ("you're on the frontier of knowledge!"; "people call you 'doctor'!"). The few principal investigators that get the giant grants are successful only because they rely on an army of underpaid experts. Which means there is an incentive--even if unconscious--to convince people that status is worth the lower salaries. The fights for being first-author, or publishing in a top-tier journal, or even insisting on being called "Doctor" are all competitions for status, because that's what you're getting paid instead of money. Open Source is the same way. Arguments about purity ("is that really an OSS license") and self-sacrifice ("I won't accept money from corporations") are all evidence that people are earning status instead of money. By itself, this is not a bad thing (in either OSS or Academia). People should be free to choose how to sell their time. The problem is that those who benefit from the work-for-status arrangement (large corporations, large universities, and their leaders) are incented to use dark patterns to preserve that arrangement. We're sensitive to social media sites using dark patterns to manipulate people into trading work (or money) for pleasure. We should be equally sensitive to how open-source culture can (even unintentionally) drive people to be underpaid.