In reply to Rick.

Regarding: "programmers get paid a salary, not on sales by unit". What is the problem when programmers actually run a healthy business instead of getting paid by salary? Is that a bad thing? Or isn't it just smart? :-)

Salaries usually don't scale very well as your time is limited and unless you're a celebrity, your hourly rate will be limited at some point as well. That isn't a very good starting point for a successful scalable business, unless you have a business model like for example Codeable where the company basically is offering freelance work on a large scale. In that case the company of course is scalable, but the developers still have limited income based on their available time and resources.