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.