I'm not sure the author is well aware of the open source community. There is a large body of very large software projects that really only go in this "Type 0" b

I'm not sure the author is well aware of the open source community. There is a large body of very large software projects that really only go in this "Type 0" but are nonetheless much bigger than little plugins. I seem to recall a project started by ... oh was it ... I believe it was someone from Finland ... Anyway, I think this misses the spirit of the community. There's also this idea that I've heard Joel Spolsky talk about, such as once you introduce money, you change the situation drastically. Imagine an kernel module programmer building the module for the usual reasons, now say someone provided the programmer a method to pay some trivial amounts, like $5 or $10 ... Now, you introduce a very small amount of money and it can give the programmer a feeling of "this is a waste of time" because, say, someone working at MS doing a similar job is making much more money doing basically the same thing. This is not to say the programmer doesn't deserve or that making $20 is not better than $0 but it changes the dynamic in an odd way.