Guan's question raises an interesting possibility regarding OpenSource business models. Right now, what I mostly see happing is individual clients paying companies like aD to build to their own needs. Then aD rolls whatever might be useful to everyone back into the code base. Alternatively, hackers add whatever they personally need to the code base.
It would be interesting, though, to set up a consortium where groups of users who want particular features could pool their money to pay the primary maintainers of the code to implement those features in the common code base. Ben, does this sound like a model that would be compatible with OpenForce.net? And is this something that others are doing now?
