The best trick in blogging: wait a while, and someone else will write your entry for you. Dave Winer said yesterday:
Very little really usable software has come from people who are willing to work for $0. (I chose my words carefully, infrastructure is another matter entirely.) Further, it’s weird to say, as Richard Stallman does, that by coercing programmers to work for $0 that that’s freedom. To me it seems obvious that that’s slavery.
… which seemed to me so wrong, on so many levels. But it took a better man than me to write the gentlemanly reply (and from more experience than I can provide too):
I’m surprised by each of these sentiments: that we’re not writing usable software, that we’re not making money, and that it’s coercion (and thus slavery).