I'm pretty sure nearly all incentives are perverse.
Pike Place motivation philosphy
An Octave developer write, and then holds a patch hostage, until users are willing to pay up.
Turns out, Linus' has his own law which is much less well known than the law named after Linus by Eric Raymond. The actual Linus' law is, "every motivation that makes a person do something can be classified under "survival", "social life" or "entertainment"."
"Benkler attributes their success to ways they have found to assure contributors that when you produce you will be able to control what you produce. Cash doesn’t change hands. The challenge is to learn about human collaboration in general from these web-based examples. In Benkler’s words “replacing Leviathan with a collaborative system.â€"
