If you want people to pay you for your software, stop writing it for free. Conversely, if you write it for free, don't expect people to pay you for it. Otherwise you are no better than someone at an intersection with a bottle of Windex and a squeegee who, unsolicited, cleans a windshield and then demands the driver to pay for it.

The original authors of Free Software and open source were career academics and others who were paid to do other things, or were sponsored by scientific and defense research grants. I don't know how anyone got the nutty idea that you could make money on FOSS itself. Practically every time someone has tried to make money on FOSS it has failed, from Netscape on down.

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askvictor 21 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

There's nothing stopping you from charging money for FOSS software. Sell the first one for as much as it cost to write it.

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singpolyma3 27 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

In what world was Netscape a failure? Made some people an awful lot of money and then gave us Firefox... Pretty far from failure

	▲	nnutter 6 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Netscape basically died and was replaced by Firefox which doesn't/can't effectively charge users for the software so instead makes money by selling default search engine, etc. Netscape existed as the internet was coming into existence. You used to have to buy a physical copy in the store to install it. People barely knew how to use their computers so the activation cost for bypassing their "pay wall" was high enough.