How much money (if any) did the authors of the Agile Software Development methodology make on their idea?
The authors of the agile manifesto are a diverse group of leading independent software develoment professionals, authors and consultants. They did not come up with the “idea” for agile and they do not “own” it. What they did was agree on a set of common principles and terms for what they and a lot of other people were working on independently to improve software development. There are no public accounts of what they earn but it is well known within the industry that successful contractors earn more than permanents; successful training providers earn more than contractors and people who own a successful training or consulting company with multiple employees can sell it for several to many millions. Being one of the “name” experts in “Agile” will have increased the value of those experts personal brand; but whether they were able to turn that into cash or not depends on the approach they took from that point. People who are permanent employees probably did not benefit that much but small
