In reply to Rick.

Otto, in proper software development companies programmers are always being paid for developing products which do not exist yet, so not much point to talk about being paid from revenue/profits. As an anecdote I am still shocked but I saw a guy which was licensing a relatively small component for a company and got money based on product sales and this is the closest I saw to developers being paid for their coding directly from sales.
But if you think about it this is how startups work. People develop software and in return get some ownership of the company which in indirect way means they do money from sales.

Wordpress environment is different in that a "one man show" company can have a viable software product, and in this kind of companies you can't make the distinction between the programmer and the CEO, but IMO it is not different than any other software development companies - programmer works without even knowing if there will be sales and the CEO gets the money from the sales. It just happens to be the same person