Things have to change here, I agree 100%. It's just not right that people are getting rich off of open source coders and not giving anything back. On the other hand, if people can figure out a way to share some of the revenue, Open Source could become a much more attractive choice for programmers, and we would all benefit.
Sun is proposing that open-source developers be paid for the revenue-generating technology that they have made available for free.
At the CommunityOne and NetBeansDay events in San Francisco on Monday, Rich Green, Sun executive vice president for software, expressed doubts about the current model in which open-source developers create free intellectual property and have others scoop it up to generate huge amounts of revenue.
"It really is a worrisome social artifact," Green said. "I think in the long term that this is a worrisome scenario [and] not sustainable. We are looking very closely at compensating people for the work that they do."
The current scenario is Robin Hood backwards: stealing from the poor and making others rich, said Green. He stressed that Sun, however, is the number-one contributor to open source worldwide.
There is a need to work closely with those in the open-source community to share revenues, said Green.
from slashdot 
