Why would people make free apps if they can sell them?

For the same reasons people make free apps now . . . for the love of it . . . and a little publicity never hurt anyone . . . their are plenty of “FREE AS IN BEER” products and services that have become very valuable business over the years . . . for example Firefox and WordPress.

Both are FREE as in Beer and Open Source . . . so open in licence that you can modify and re-brand them as your own.

And Mozilla is a very profitable company due to the default search engine being a sponsored Google Search and selling support as toupeiro pointed out . . .

Mozilla was supposedly banking about $100 million after taxes and that was back in 2008!

WordPress aka Automatic follows in the same format . . . FREE as in Beer and Open Source . . . they show Google Ads on FREE WordPress.com hosted blogs and sell support WordPress VIP and upgrades as well as hosting. Put you can run the wordpress code on your own site and have no obligation to even include a powered by wordpress link in your footer . . . furthermore they have WP-MU which allows you to basically run your own WP.com . . . all with out any licences preventing you from changing the code and doing what you want with it . . .

WordPress’s founder and Automatic CEO Matt Mullenweg is quite well off with a Net Worth of over $40 Million USD – CNW

So you see guys even though I agree that selling products and services is 100% completely OK and sometimes a necessary evil that doesn’t mean that the FREE as in Beer and Open Source route does not take the gold when it comes too manny things . . .

Lets Take a look at the Top 10 Websites in the world according to Alexa.com

1
Google – “FREE as in Beer” with many “open source” API’s any can use for FREE to tap into their services
google.com Enables users to search the Web, Usenet, and images. Features include PageRank, caching and tra… More

2
Facebook – “FREE as in Beer” with many “open source” API’s any can use for FREE to tap into their services
facebook.com A social utility that connects people, to keep up with friends, upload photos, share links and … More

3
YouTube – Broadcast yourself – “FREE as in Beer” with many “open source” API’s any can use for FREE to tap into their services
youtube.com YouTube is a way to get your videos to the people who matter to you. Upload, tag and share your… More

4
Yahoo! – “FREE as in Beer” with many “open source” API’s any can use for FREE to tap into their services
yahoo.com Personalized content and search options. Chatrooms, free e-mail, clubs, and pager.

5
Windows Live – “FREE as in Beer” with many “open source” API’s any can use for FREE to tap into their services(Yes Windows Live aka Bing has a FREE Open Search API)
live.com Search engine from Microsoft.

6
Baidu.com “FREE as in Beer”
baidu.com The leading Chinese language search engine, provides “simple and reliable” search exp… More

7
Wikipedia – “FREE as in Beer” with many “open source” API’s any can use for FREE to tap into their services
wikipedia.org An online collaborative encyclopedia.

8
Blogger.com
blogger.com Free, automated weblog publishing tool that sends updates to a site via FTP.

9
Twitter – “FREE as in Beer” with TONS of “open source” API’s any can use for FREE to tap into their services
twitter.com Social networking and microblogging service utilising instant messaging, SMS or a web interface.

10
MSN – “FREE as in Beer”
msn.com Portal for shopping, news and money, e-mail, search, and chat.

While they are not all “open source” they almost all offer some type of “open source” API so developers can tap into their services for FREE and create applications with them. Also you will notice that many of them all of them are “FREE as in Beer” to use and rarely sell any type services to the public. They instead give their best services away for free and leverage they popularity of those services to turn a profit through advertising, marketing . . . Et cetera.

WordPress.com Clocks in at Number 19 aka the nineteenth most visited website on the internet. WordPress is completely open source and completely FREE as in Beer Software. As a matter of fact WordPress is the Software that powers this blog!

19
WordPress.com
wordpress.com Free blogs managed by the developers of the WordPress software. Includes custom design template..

So you see while Making Money from Open Source Software may seem like an obstacle at times. If your idea is good and people catch on to it, than you may find that your open source idea or hobby may become a life changer.

Let’s look at the founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg again. He was a former CNET employee while wordpress was getting started and now Matt is living it up on the Embarcadero.

(631 days ago)

HYPEEATER.com is your #1 source for Hip-Hop celebrity news, photos, exclusive music videos, interviews and all the latest in the world of hip hop and R&B music.