Robert Treat brings up some interesting points in his Open Source “Business” Models post. I’ve long believed that hiring an open source developer and allowing him or her to spend a significant amount of time continuing to work on open source projects is a great way to support open source projects. Robert points out some interesting details about the PostgreSQL core team:
…of the 26 developers listed on our “Major Developers” list, only two work for the same company (Command Prompt)
PostgreSQL isn’t the only project to have grown into that model, he also mentions FreeBSD, Ruby on Rails and Joomla as projects with core teams that are employed by mostly different companies.
If only I had an unlimited supply of money 🙂