Uncovering the Secret of Free Software Profits

[The legend]

How do they do it??

I don't know much about internet business nor whether this is the right place to post this ..
but here it is..

Well .. we use these free services like say Skype (without credit) , or teamviewer or Winrar (none of the guys I know purchased the full version) etc ... so how do the company guys earn from it ?
I don't think these are fully free service... they have got to get some profit to keep their software running!

So ... please share your thoughts.

 

[fatra2]

Hi there,

There are much much more to the list you just posted. Take a look at www.sourceforge.net. This is the host of many many open source sofware. Take a look at the free software foundation's website to learn more about the open source and the GNU General Public License.

To answer your question. The software distributed for free, whether using GPL or not, rely on different source of revenu, development. I will talk about the GPL, which is one that I know most. In the open source world, you can get the software, to run on your machine. But the great thing about it is that you can also get the code for this software. You are free to make any changes to it. If you do so, you can also send the changes back to the original developers, to be include in the next distribution. This community idea is a great to get the best knowledge from all over the world, at very little cost.

Secondly, the free software, to sustain a long term development, accept donation. Therefore, if you have a couple of bucks burning holes through your pockets, you could donate to these guys.

Thirdly, publicity is another source of revenu.

Cheers.

 

[MATLABdude]

For 'shareware' (or nagware) type software, people (and more often, companies and businesses--think AVG Antivirus) often actually do shell out money for the programs.

For services like Skype, Facebook, Google, or even PhysicsForums, they sell advertising. I seem to recall way back in the 90s that some companies were giving away computers (or maybe it was free Internet?) in exchange for you watching ads!

A while back (and probably still to this day), a number of software companies got in trouble when they bundled spyware/malware with their programs (that was how they made their money--they just either didn't realize what they were signing up for, or thought it was a reasonable trade off. The more modern equivalent would be websites that unwittingly allow malicious browser exploits and what not.