Sun is proposing that companies find ways to pay open source developers for their work. What a novel concept! 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 rea Sun is proposing that companies find ways to pay open source developers for their work. What a novel concept! 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.”Sun, of course, is not the problem here. The company is arguably the world’s biggest contributor to open source software communities, and pays quite a few people to spend their time writing free software to give away to others. IBM, Novell, Red Hat, and others also pay out a lot of money for open source software development. The problem, of course, is the same that plagues R&D generally: open source development has become as corporatized as scientific research has – perhaps more so. So while Sun and these others fund a lot of open source development, it tends to only go toward immediate, self-centered development (which is what you’d expect of corporations that are legally required to make money, not charity). It would therefore be ideal to see general investment into software communities that don’t necessarily benefit any particular corporation. Pure open source research, as it were. I’m not sure how this would be achieved, but I think it would be a Very Good Thing for developers to get to work on projects they find interesting to them, regardless of whether it’s interesting to Red Hat, or IBM, or Oracle, or whomever.As a side note, and possibly of greater concern, is all the Web 2.0 free-riding that goes on in open source. Google and Yahoo! have started to contribute back to open source more aggressively, but the major swath of Web 2.0 companies take…and give nothing back (except dumb company names). This is why some of us have agitated for OSI-approved licenses that help to ensure that Web 2.0 beneficiaries of open source become benefactors, too. Open Source