This guy is absolutely, positively, dead wrong about OSS projects and money.

I think this is a case where your credentials matter--while Atwood doesn't have a huge array of Open Source projects under his belt and just this one data point, he still has one real data point. What Open Source projects do you manage, or have you managed, that would have been dramatically positively impacted by receiving a no-strings $5000 cash infusion?

I've built two companies based on Open Source software now, and I can assure you that spending money to make things happen in Open Source can be challenging. People are often involved in Open Source for reasons other than money. Over the years I've probably managed a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of expenditure on Open Source development...and on many occasions it wasn't with the core developers on a project, because the core developers had no interest in the money, either due to their employment contracts, difficulty in dealing with foreign payments, or simply a desire to keep their Open Source work purely for fun.

When I was considering what my options were when shutting down my old business (just prior to starting Virtualmin), I spent a little time building a website specifically for throwing money at Open Source projects to get things done (called ransomware.com, and I still have the domain...maybe once I've got some free time from Virtualmin I'll spin it into something). It's still a gaping hole in the Open Source world, but it's one that's incredibly hard to fill, and you can't do it in the obvious ways.

Google SoC covers one aspect, but it's an "internship" style model, which doesn't produce "core" code very well--it's just as much for teaching as it is for producing code, and requires significant time investment on the part of the project. SourceForge donations provides "tips", but it doesn't seem to work well for getting specific project work done. There have been a few others, but they seem to fizzle out pretty quickly, as I think the profit potential for the orchestrating company is small...it's almost gotta be a non-profit to convince people to take part. Finally, a lot of folks use eLance, Rent-A-Coder, and others, to get work like this done--I frequently see projects come up related to our software in my Google Alerts--but it's not targeted to this purpose, and the code ends up being "one off" rather than finding its way into the core codebase...I know we have never heard of any of these projects coming back into our codebase (which is fine...a large percentage of our code is BSD-licensed, and so there's no obligation to let us know what's going on with it).

So, while I agree that money can certainly be used to great effect on Open Source projects, it takes time to make it useful, and sometimes you don't want to use it for the obvious "get more features", since a lot of developers on Open Source software like to do that stuff themselves even if it comes more slowly. We've begun spending money on Webmin and Usermin, now that we have some...but for ancillary stuff, like design and logos, and graphics. Jamie still writes almost all of the code (and a couple of other occasional contributors and I write a tiny remaining percentage).