More and more companies are experimenting with paying open source developers. Why?

• Some pay to recruit hard to find talent.
  Wikipedia will be paying illustrators because good technical diagrams are hard to come by and people aren’t contributing them like the rest of content. 
• Some pay to encourage more participation in certain projects. 
  Sun just launched a new initiative to pay people to work on key open source projects that Sun has invested in.  They also announced that they believe most of these new, paid open source developers will be in India which prompted a funny quote on Slashdot:
           “Shit! First they outsource our paying jobs to India, now they want to outsource our hobbies there, too?!” 
  Note that there aren’t a whole lot of Indian open source developers at the moment.
• Some pay to reward outstanding contributions.
  Nokia has a Forum Nokia Champion program that rewards people for “their outstanding skills and devotion to the Forum Nokia community.”
• Others are trying to connect a paying customer with a specific need with available developers.
  SourceForge Marketplace is out of beta.  This is a forum where OSS developers can sell their services to paying customers.
• And still others are trying to build a sustainable business model that enables enterprises to use open source software by aggregating open source software support and contracting open source software developers to resolve issues.
  OpenLogic sells aggregated support for open source software and pays open source software developers to resolve issues and fix bugs.