Why must open source always be free?

Posted on October 16th, 2007

This is something that really bugs me, it’s like the entire community has lost focus. It is great to have the source to software because you can fix issues before the vendor can and you can make products better but people/developers need to be paid for their time.

You can argue all you want that knowledge should be free and that’s fine but time is not free and it should be used wisely. I hear the same idiotic arguments for say an Outlook replacement, everyone goes on about finding an open source replacement … no – find a better product, it doesn’t have to be free.

Keep your code open and share with people but make a living doing it otherwise you’ll burn out like so many well known open source developers have. You think firefox is free? … think again.