On 12/17/2016 08:29 PM, Charles Cossé wrote:

On Sat, Dec 17, 2016 at 12:13 PM, Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.pro> wrote:

If you own an apartment in a building with elevators, you have to pay
service charges to the company that maintains it.

With all due respect, where's the motivation for the poor bugger who writes the free software? I believe that there is still something missing from this equation.

The software developer would normally be paid by the hour to produce free software for industrial use.

That's what my company does, anyway, even if we don't make software for elevators or embedded systems in general.

So it's okay to pay the company to maintain the elevator but not the software developer? Where's the motivation for the software developer?

... to maintain the elevator, and as part of that, the software. The developer's motivation would be the paycheck. Payment by invoiceable hours is a standard business model for free software developers. Support contracts are too.