Well, I've been working as a software developer for about 11 years now. I spent the first 8 of those years working as an employee for an internet/web development company. The last 3 years I've been working as a freelance developer.

I've always been paid just to make/plan/design software. Some free/open source software, some for-sale products, but mostly custom software for use by a specific client (project ranging from a day's work to about two years).

In all those years I've never been paid based on sales, I've just been paid based on work (i.e. monthly pay, billable hours or fixed-price delivery). As far as I know that's typical here (in the Netherlands).

I'm not saying you can't get paid more if you can get another arrangement. One point I'm trying to make is that many programmers do get paid "on commission". The other point is that there is a hell of a lot of custom software that would (given market forces really would work the way I was taught in high school :-) ) cost about the same regardless of licence.

"What should it profit a man, if he should win a flame war, yet lose his cool?"

In reply to Re^2: Richard Stallman speaks at Hehigh University. by Joost
in thread Richard Stallman speaks at Hehigh University. by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.