Well maybe that is the point. The developers get paid, somehow, so why do they need to get even more money? This way more people can use their software because it is free.
Yeah. I can definitely see the point. I also realize that open source software is often a political statement, and good for that. But at the same time, I want to see a world where a developer could earn money from making cool applications like this without relying on a large corporation for the bulk of their paycheck. It's what the free-to-play app store model is coalescing to, and I don't like it.
Sure, but what is a right price? Shall all code editors cost the same and differentiate on features? Otherwise it seems to me like a race to the bottom where CotEditor people charge $30 and indie developer charges $25. So what about the next indie developer then? $20?
And yes you are right, as developers we tend to publish useful stuff more often for free than not. But maybe it stems from our inability to market cool applications so that we get money for them.
Astounding. That's potentially the most harmful opinion a developer could possibly hold.
The single greatest benefit of having our skill set is that we are capable, in a way that few other people in the world are capable, of single handedly building products that we can sell for the kind of money that frees us from needing to work for other people. We can quite literally create our own destiny.
And you would throw that away.
I can't even begin to fathom why you would want to live in that world.
Money isn't what we're optimizing though. It's freedom.
Having a software product as income source means you don't have to have a day job working for somebody else. It means you can spend your time doing whatever you want, be that working on your own personal projects, surfing, traveling or, yes, earning more money. You can even choose to build open source Mac text editors and give them away for free.
It's your choice what to do with that freedom. The important point is that we, as software developers, are essentially handed that freedom by nature of our skill set.
That's a really cool thing. So while I can see an entitled end-user saying something like the grandparent's "you already have a job that pays you, so give us the output from your nights and weekends for free", it's surprising to see that attitude from somebody who would be most impacted, were that to become a reasonable expectation.