I think there was a bit of creative journalism in one of the articles.
Yes, we recently stopped paying individual performance bonuses. Instead, we gave everyone a once off salary bump. We prefer to just pay top market salaries rather than variable personal bonuses. (although we continued to pay the organisational bonus and we've recently given every staff member stock options)
It's not an annual flat 8% rise
More here: http://blogs.atlassian.com/news/2010/08/atlassians_big_exper...