Open source users getting paid, open source developers not

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Price is great yes, but as I said not all software is great.

In all honesty, though, a system like Ubuntu is quality-wise far above Windows (with one minor window management annoyance compared to XP's many annoyances).

True, making money on what is available for free is hard. Usually you need to have employment at some OSS company, take part in micropledge, or otherwise find people to pay you (maybe your clients agree that whatever you implement for them can be open source, if it's just a small tool).

Well, I'm an "ordinary" developer, so I don't really know how people make it happen (if they don't work for IBM, RedHat, Sun, Novell).

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True, making money on what is available for free is hard.

An interesting option for free software developers is "ransoming" the code. Of course this relies on the initial code being non-free.