Software as a service is an excellent way to protect against piracy which is why its growing so fast. You can offer your client your software free that he could get through piracy but instead you keep him close and offer him a monthly service of improvements and support that the pirated software cannot offer. If he is unwilling to pay then a) he is not really interested b) he is not able to afford it . So you know that in his case piracy is not really a problem because he is not a potential client. Just because someone pirate something does not mean he is a potential client. Also piracy is not a new thing, I have been in front a computer since 1988 and piracy was there since day 1, software, games , music and film. Sure the internet made it easier but it was already super easy when I was teenager I had ton of pirated music because the price of a CD was certainly nowhere near my budget. The problem got worse because a) the industries became very, very greedy b) quality droped for the sake of mass production (especially true for the music industry) . So companies are 90% to blame here and not piracy.

Yes, good points. I think it is unfortunate that you can't really get paid for writing the open source code itself. You can get paid to write books, speak, or work for a big company.

I would guess that authors of books about Python have made more money than Guido himself did off Python, which seems a little wrong.

But I suppose the situation isn't different from that of other people who produce "IP", as you say. Recording the brilliant album is not enough -- you have to market it and go on tour too.

I think about this a lot. Imagine a world in which all software (and other "IP") is FLO. How do we decide how to distribute money, without the mechanism of "consumers buy what they want and are willing to pay for"?

The best answer I have is -- it's no longer about paying for the software -- after all, anybody can fork it -- it's about paying the developer. If you've really enjoyed the Civ games, maybe you give your monthly donation to Sid Meyer. If you love Starcraft and Hearthstone, donate to Blizzard.

While there's some groupthink and over-indexing for excitement to look out for in such a system, the prospect of a more human-oriented approach to funding FLO development is exciting to me.

I somewhat agree with that, but the big problem I see is credit and politics.

Guido didn't develop Python alone -- there are a huge number of equally talented and hard-working Python contributors. How do you determine what to pay each one of them?

You could give the money to Guido to redistribute, but now you have a huge political problem on your hands, and the possibility of slowing down the project through hurt feelings and the like.

There's really no good solution that I see. That's not to say that we can't improve on the status quo, though. Patreon seems like a good step, though I haven't used it.

It's kind of a hole in capitalism, but I guess human nature has evolved to fill that hole. Some people are just motivated to do huge amounts of quality work, for the greater good, regardless of compensation.

I suppose the idea is that by paying people, we could encourage more work that benefits society. But to play devil's advocate, maybe it would have the opposite effect? Those people aren't motivated by money. Maybe paying them would bias the work they produce... they would come up with stuff that seems more "saleable/donateable" NOW rather than being creative about the things we need 10 years from now.

> by paying people, we could encourage more work that benefits society

Generally, incentives have no effect on creativity (as measured by a panel of judges), or at most, slightly reduce it as they distract the person from the creative work: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10683-015-9440-5 And obviously fiscal pressure (loans, bankruptcy, etc.) would have a negative impact. But beyond that it's hard to see any correlation between payment and outcome, hence the argument for a basic income.

Payment only makes sense for the non-creative, "manual" aspects of society (which are responsive to incentives). As more of these manual tasks are automated, capitalism makes less and less sense. That's kind of what Marx was getting at when he said capitalism was "self-defeating", although he too got a little sidetracked by power structures. I still have no real evidence that power structures even exist; they're a nice theory but basically unmeasurable. E.g., Trump is president, the effect on society/culture/business/daily life seems basically nil: http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/trump-win-changes-nothing... http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-do-nothing-presidency-2...

If the only way to earn living is to do manual work, creative people will end up manually working. Because they need to eat and their children need to eat. On a large scale, creative industrise happen when money happen to flow that way.

Moreover, while creativity matters in programming, large chunk of it is closer to manual work - you add features, you add tests, you test manually, you document, you debug etc.

Sometimes I wish that online store like Amazon gave people the option to pay more than the asking price for some thing, where all surplus money would go to the creator of that thing.

This could even extend to zero-cost items like free software. You could "buy" a software package for zero dollars, with a five dollar tip going to the author.

Amazon uses a lot of free and open source software, so this sort of thing could be in their interests even if they don't make money off of it directly.

You can look at his resume: https://www.linkedin.com/in/guido-van-rossum-4a0756/. I'm not sure what "Director of PythonLabs" is, but my guess is it's basically speaking at a ton of conferences about Python. And conference fees are not cheap; he probably made more than the books. Not to mention he still does speaking gigs, keynotes, etc. Pretty much his whole career/professional network came for free, from Python, so he has his pick of jobs or un-jobs