Incentives for Open Source development

One balance that has to be achieved in open source development is that between the motivation of the individual developer and the organization in which they work. It's important that these don't become at odds with one another, it is possible to make sure they are aligned. The following experiences illustrate the issue.

In a previous job I had a developer introduced us to a commercial tool (SQL Navigator) for doing custom SQL queries, exporting query results, etc and well as providing something close to an integrated development environment (IDE) for Oracle's PL/SQL language. This tool, along with another called TOAD, was very useful so we bought a site license. In a later job I advocated the use of such tools.

I mentioned these to a developer at that company who was working on the product I was responsible for. He mentioned that was writing a generic SQL query utility as a plug in for Eclipse. In our situation we had sufficient resources to get a site license for Toad and SQLNavigator. This seemed like a reasonable approach so that the developers could focus their time on the project that was generating revenue for the company.