On 9/5/17, Philip Hands phil@hands.com wrote:
Great care needs to be taken when considering paying people to do things that they might otherwise do for the love of it.
If you introduce a monetary incentive, and the work is then done by people who's primary motive is money, then while the volume of contributions might well go up, the quality could plummet.
You may then find that those unpaid heroes that stand as gatekeepers, triaging patches that come into free software projects, suddenly find themselves drowning in excrement.
Which I think that illustrates the need for more guild-like behavior, where notoriety and respect of skill is proportional to one's influence networking commissioners.
The way to avoid an organization similar to modern guilds is to ensure sincere meritocracy, and the way to do that is complete, uncompromising, as well as loud transparency.