There was some debate within the Debian community about whether Open Source projects should be funded at all. Does money corrupt Open Source?

It definitely can be a corruption. One of the really great things about Debian is that people volunteer to it and then are able to work on doing things the way they think is right, rather than towards deadlines they don't believe in, or just getting a quick thing out that kind of works but you know is going to fail in the long term. That kind of makes it more fun to work on, which encourages the whole volunteer spirit which is much cheaper than trying to fund people.

There have been estimates in the past that the contributions to Debian are worth $40 million or more than that just in lines of code measurement. And if you've got a volunteer project that can generate that much work just by having people enjoy the work they're doing, then that's fabulous and you don't want to change that into a commercial arrangement where people are only doing it for the money, and you need to generate all this money just to pay them to not do as good a job.

So it [money] can corrupt, but I think in this case we've managed to avoid it by being very careful about people we've paid to do it. They were paid for a month - they still haven't actually received the money because we've had various problems getting the charity stuff set up - and they're still working just as hard right now, but they've obviously had to go back to work on their day jobs, so they have a bit less time than they did during October and November.

If money is a disincentive to doing a good job, how do you think this reflects on the Open Source community?

I think that really applies to everyone - you find a good job then suddenly it becomes a 9-to-5 thing, and you have to get up in the morning every morning to go and do it, and then you start looking at the clock and whatever else.

So you need to make sure you have the right incentives; it's not just about throwing money at someone and have them enjoy their work. And for the open source community, I think it's really demonstrated it's [the community] got a lot of strength, because even people who did feel that money was corrupted ended up forming the Dunc Bank project. And even in trying to oppose it, it really helped the project release a much better product.

When you can have people who are working in direct opposition to each other end up essentially working together to produce something better, that seems really amazing.