> I know a few devs here who will be extremely happy to be called > amateurs. Moreover, the company I work for would be very happy to have > such amateurs as employees... I would like to point out that the root meaning of 'amateur' is 'someone who loves doing what he does', and is not inherently an indicator of quality. Quality comes from investing a lot of time and effort, and when that is eaten away by stuff that's 'not fun but pays well', amateur products become less desirable. So the solution to this dilemma is to make the donations model work well enough that anyone who writes truly good software and gives it away can earn enough to survive and get what they want. We can do this by instilling into the public the thought that they should a) use free software and b) donate significant amounts of money after using it. We can simply do this by repeating the message over and over again at every opportunity, and repeat it to ourselves as well until we believe in it enough. Thus is created new 'social norms', like giving lots of money to free software developers. It's been done before, we can do it too. Carlo
