Should Big Companies Release Free Software?

[Adam]

Prompted by yet another thread about Microsoft...

Should all we codemonkeys release our software free? I say it should be entirely up to me. If it's just something I did for fun, I may release it free. However, if I spend a couple of years working on something serious, I'll want money for it. If I don't get paid for my work, I won't do such work again. This is only fair.

Now, should we expect large companies to release software free? Why, or why not?

 

[grady]

No one should be obligated to release programs free of cost, that would be crazy. It's your property if you wrote it you can do whatever you want with it.

There wouldn't be any large company if they released their stuff for free because they wouldn't have enough money to hire any programmers or designers.

But these open source programs are community efforts and what's even more crazy is to think of somebody charging for them and not having to pay the contributors. So its sort of natural for most of the open source volunteer projects to be free of cost.