judas: Uh, there's a ton of open source OSes which have far less
people working on them than MorphOS does. Now, making MOS open source
would potentially attract some people who get motivated by working on
open source projects. But it would factually *demotivate* at least
several key contributors in the current team. We know this because
they said so. Personally I'd keep these people any day over these
mystical magical open source fanatic developer that would supposedly
appear out of thin air (and what would they know about MOS
development, anyway?).


Nitro: Clearly the current team are not motivated by money mainly
(although bounties have turned out to be useful, the sums are not
large enough to be the main motivation). Your figures are unrealistic,
there are not 2000 users and most of the users that do exist would not
pay 100 euro annually. But even if you would be able to employ 2-3
programmers, that's simply not enough. MOS would *still*
depend on people working for free. And when you have 2-3 people
getting paid, what do you think this does to the motivation of the
people who don't get paid? I'm not saying the idea is to be dismissed
completely, but it's unrealistic presently and it would be rather
problematic. I don't rule out the possibility that in a few years, the
userbase could grow to a level where it would be realistic to have a
few people employed. It's hard to see what would cause this currently,
but you never know, it's not completely out in the blue. But I'm quite
sure we're not there at the moment.