Open source software developers

[Maximation]

How do open-source software developers make money, if they make any at all?

Maybe this sounds weird, but why are all the open-source programs free? You can view and edit the source code so I would assume that everyone can just get the source code and run it manually?

But what if some people don't want to mess with the code and just want a ready to use installer, wouldn't it be smart to charge some money for the installer?

If you want to be lazy, you'll have to pay for it.

Otherwise I can't think of any other way open-source software developers could make any money, except donations.

Thank you.

[colonel_mortis]

They don't for the most part. A lot of them just contribute for the fun of it, and to help with an awesome project, sometimes receiving donations in return. Some, such as the people who work as Mozilla (Firefox etc.), are paid using advertising revenue from people like google (who pay them a fair amount to make google the default search engine), and from donations.

And charging money for an installer would be a bit stupid because 1) the projects are often free because they don't want to make money on it, they just want to make an awesome piece of software, 2) someone else will make a duplicate installer from the same source for less money or free, making it pointless, 3) often there are too many people to split the money between (not all who did equal amounts of work), so it ends up not making much money and taking a lot of work to pull off, and 4) it would put people off the open sourced companies who have made the software, because one of the attractions of open sourced is that it's free (in both senses of the word)

[MatheusSanzo]

Most of them don't, really.

 

But there are exceptions... some of them charge for support, and actually in some cases it works quite well.

 

And there is the well-known "Buy me a beer".

[Maximation]

Thank you for your contributions! I prefer the true free to use software as well, I was just wondering if there are smart ways they still make some money off of (if that's a correct sentence, English isn't my native language so I would be grateful if you could correct my mistakes)

[IdeaStormer]

Some companies that want to use the software pay for it, usually the developers don't make much but sometimes they get some lump sum if a company wants it. The more you (the average Open Source user) uses it the more it gets tested and if you let the know of bugs they improve it so it can become one top notch software everyone uses. Think 7-zip, NotePad++, IrfanView, etc.