What U are proposing isn’t collaboration – U said it yourself, that it’s a contest. And about money: What prove would have the contest holders about payment to contestants, when those would revile their PRESIOUS ideas. Ideas are COSTLESS, so U can give them only for free.
Just like Me, I give all of U my EXPa Mod for free – ENJOY it!
Please tell me if this is an accurate translation of what you're saying (no slight intended):
What you are proposing isn’t collaboration – it’s a contest. And about money: <untranslatable gibberish deleted, but seemed irrelevant> Ideas are COSTLESS, so you can't sell them.
Just like I give all of you my EXPa Mod for free – ENJOY it!
I bolded the part I actually wanted to talk about.
Even if your assertion that ideas have no cost was true, quite a few people sell their ideas, because they still have value. If country A makes tools in a blacksmith shop and country B gets the idea to make all their tools in a factory, which country is going to be taking over the other one pretty soon? I'd say the idea to make tools in an assembly-line fashion was worth a lot.
But stuff is also worth what someone will pay for it. It's very good of you to give away your work, which was more than just an idea, but you know there isn't a lot of demand for MOO2 mods, and probably none for mods that cost money when so many are free. You give your mod away because no one would pay for it, not out of altruism or because the idea didn't cost you anything.
Putting aside that you put in a lot of work, as did whoever made the tools that made your work possible, getting your idea wasn't exactly free either. You had to have schooling when you were younger to be able to understand the game and figure out how to make it better. You also had to have schooling to figure out how to properly express your idea, both to yourself and to us. Schooling isn't free. You and your teachers had to eat and your parents had to clean up your mess the first few years of your life.
Let's not even get deep into what productive things you could've been doing instead of coming up with, writing down, and building your ideas. How many hours did you spend on it for "free" that you could have spent working at a paying job earning a living wage? Earning a really good wage?
But I'm getting into "reaching" territory here, so I'll stop.
The point is that people can and do sell their ideas all the time. There is nothing inherently evil about this, and it doesn't make you a sell-out, and if this is the only way to get reliable people to accomplish a task that they otherwise wouldn't care about, then who really cares, so long as it gets accomplished?
If people really want to see such-and-such done, then they need to be willing to pay for it, because even if the results are just an idea implemented, this still took time and effort and took away from people's work time or relaxation time, and if they aren't being compensated in some way, why would they do it? Personal satisfaction only goes so far.
(For the record, I have also created and given away things, and I intermittantly work on a number of things that I want to give away, but like you, I don't have a huge market for what I give, so I'm not rich or famous from it. It's a labor of love, but it takes a back seat to earning money and relaxing.)