[camus]

I always thought if you have a product that works but is free , you can commditize it by selling your infrastructure as a service ( paid API , hosting , etc ... ).

For instance , instragram could sell a way to make instragram clones in the cloud, like wordpress has a free blog script and sells blog hosting for that script, you get my point. Once you understand a domain and develop an app for that , should be easy to sell your app infrastructure as a service for thirdparty apps.

[derrida]

The problem? They can't really sell that.

Want to make an Instagram clone? Write a web interface for Imagemagick Youtube clone? Interface for ffmpeg... This gets boring quickly. :-)