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How can it be free?
- People need to eat.
- How can the authors make money?
- Sell consulting services.
- Sell specialized version.
- Sell an extended, commercial version.
- Sell books and other documentation.
- Sometimes, there's no need for immediate profit.
- Project might be a personal interest hobby for weekend coding.
- University thesis project.
- Under-written by a company which has a need for a solution,
but isn't in the business of software.
- Under-written by a company which makes money distributing the
software with other services. (e.g. IBM and Apache, RedHat and Linux
kernel)
- Loss leader. Give your software away to promote the company and
gain market share.
- 90% of software development is for internal use.
- If software isn't a profit center, then it's better to have
development partners also contributing.
- Apache, the web server, was
created this way. A stable server was needed by commercial and
educational organizations -- patches were passed around amoungst admins
against the NCSA server, thus was born "a patchy" server.
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