There's a lot of debate these days about the impact of the increasing number of paid developers in FOSS communities that started as volunteer efforts and still have significant numbers of volunteers.

According to the open source industry group FOSSBazaar, there are plenty of organizations that view using the software as risky. But the group maintains that concerns about open source stem from often poorly understood legal issues that could be overcome with some education.

What’s the difference between a paid contributor to a FOSS project and a volunteer contributor?

Does motivation matter? Open source contributors are increasingly people who are paid to work on open source. GNOME contributor Lucas Rocha asks how this impacts communities over the long term. This is not a new question by any stretch.

Open source is looking more attractive to software development managers who need to make their budgets stretch farther, as the enterprise can benefit from FOSS community's contributions. Here's how to participate in open-source projects and measure developers' success.

At CeBIT Open Source 2009 Martin Michlmayr, past Debian project lead, presented his current projects FOSSology and FOSSBazaar, and spoke about the role his employer Hewlett-Packard is giving him in the governance project and how the FOSSBazaar work group is organized within the Linux Foundation.

In a recent survey by Packt Publishing, 70% of software developers said that they have donated time, money, or both to open source projects. However, with large projects like Wikipedia receiving over one million dollars from just three charitable foundations last year, the question remains whether open source really needs individual contributions from developers to survive.

Despite frequent speculation that corporate financing is dangerous to the ethos of the open source software (OSS) community, most Australian open source developers don't see payment as a primary influence on their contributions, a straw poll of attendees at Linux.conf.au in Melbourne suggests.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and open source software, today announced that its Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) governance workgroup, called FOSSBazaar, has nearly doubled its membership since launching in January.