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Hi
Yes there are two ways to look at software, as a tool and as entertainment. By entertainment I don't mean games and the like. I mean writing programs for the fun of it without any particular commercial interest.
As a tool in commerce, companies use softaware to make money and will employ programmers (or contractors ) to write these programs which need to be paid for, quite rightly so. This is what all the commercial programs are about. Even "open source material can be classed as such"
On the other hand there are people like me who write little programs for fun and never think about the cost of development and supply them "free" to anyone who is interested. These people however are generally rewarded in other ways like honing skills etc. and of course eventually make money out of the "training". I would put all open source softaware in this catagory. Most of it is written by programmers who make money from their work in other ways so, is it really free?. As someone else said, The only thing that can be given free is "love" as if it is not given free it cannot be "love"
My pet program is Stellarium which is open source but the developer was in fact employed by ESO for three years to develop an open source version for them. This allowed him much time to develop the "free" version which most of you know.
Barry
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