There's little doubt that the motivation crowding-out effect [1] exists. However, before one runs around, saying that rewards are "often no motivator", one shou

There's little doubt that the motivation crowding-out effect [1] exists. However, before one runs around, saying that rewards are "often no motivator", one should remember the basic premise of these studies: "People were intrinsically motivated to complete a certain task, initially." In many economic contexts, this is seldomly the case. How many people are intrinsically motivated to fix a broken toilet, for example? True, it may hold under certain circumstances -- so-called creative and similar work. But developing software is not just creative work. There's also lots of boilerplate work to do to make software a good product: It needs to satisfy the wants and needs of the user, not the developer. It needs to be easy-to-use. It needs informative and reassuring promotion (ie. a nice homepage). It needs proper documentation. It needs to be easily installable and removable. But even Free Software developers are not intrinsically motivated to provide these features. Thus, many Free Software projects fail badly as products. Sure, there may be people out there who are intrinsically motivated to do some of these tasks - writing, for example. But when they are, they often have better things to create, namely their own creative works. Why should anyone who enjoys to write, care about the lack of documentation for some unknown software project, even if it's "Free"? This is why so-called "non-free software" is useful and necessary and hardly anything "immoral" or "unethical": It provides benefits lots of people want and need. In other words: I doubt, the GNU project posted this on their web site to educate the public. Probably, they just did it to support their political agenda. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation_crowding_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation_crowding_theory