““in the absence of money compensation, think “It’s not worth submitting this fix because I’ll have to clean up the patch, write a ChangeLog entry, and sign the FSF assignment papers...”. It’s for this reason that the number of contributors (and, at second order, the success of) projects is strongly and inversely correlated with the number of hoops each project makes a contributing user go through. Such friction costs may be political as well as mechanical. Together I think they explain why the loose, amorphous Linux culture has attracted orders of magnitude more cooperative energy than the more tightly organized and centralized BSD efforts — and why the Free Software Foundation has receded in relative importance as Linux has risen.””
