> How did Linus convince hordes of people of contributing to his kernel, his trademark, for free?
You will find -- unsurprisingly -- that most of them are not contributing for free.
That's not to say there aren't people contributing code written in their spare time. I'm one of them (but not completely: there's stuff I wrote on my own, and submitted in my own name, and also a bunch of stuff I wrote on the job). But the vast majority of people contributing critical code are not doing it for free, and haven't been doing it for free for a very, very long time. Unpaid contributions are the exception, rather than the norm.
> You will find -- unsurprisingly -- that most of them are not contributing for free.
How does that invalidate my point? GP asked why people would contribute to leader-directed open source without coercion. I just pointed out no coercion is needed. Free or paid is irrelevant.
> How do you propose that people work *for free* at the behest of a leader directing such unpaid contributors how to o their work?
(Emphasis mine)
No coercion is involved, but they don't work for free, either. Free vs. paid is extremely relevant. If you were to strip out the paid contributions from the driver tree, for example, you'd be left with a handful of drivers, virtually none of which cover non-trivial devices released in the last fifteen years or so with anything near full functionality.
> You will find -- unsurprisingly -- that most of them are not contributing for free.
Is that a meaningful distinction? I don't think the point was that the people actually writing the code aren't paid, but rather it still holds when you consider that the people paying them choose to allocate those efforts to a dictatorial organization rather than addressing their goals in some other way.
You will find -- unsurprisingly -- that most of them are not contributing for free.
That's not to say there aren't people contributing code written in their spare time. I'm one of them (but not completely: there's stuff I wrote on my own, and submitted in my own name, and also a bunch of stuff I wrote on the job). But the vast majority of people contributing critical code are not doing it for free, and haven't been doing it for free for a very, very long time. Unpaid contributions are the exception, rather than the norm.