> There’s more people (perhaps another dozen) pitching in with translation, release engineering (preparing Ardour for users), Mantis triaging (“Mantis” is the bug database used to keep track of known problems, “triaging” the process of prioritizing/verifying bugs) and other necessary tasks.
http://ardour.org/support_expectations.html
I have a hard time believing that $240k/year is enough to pay an honest market rate to all these people for their time.
There is also additional revenue flow via Harrison Consoles' Mixbus, which is a separate commercial product based on Ardour. The amount that flows "directly" to Ardour is small, but the overall amount does add another person at Harrison working on the software in a mostly-full-time capacity.
Also, which market should we be aiming for when defining "market rate" ?
That's a very good question :)