On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 9:33 PM, Binand Sethumadhavan binand@gmail.comwrote:
2010/12/29 Sagar Belure sagar.belure@gmail.com:
Maybe I'm asking another noob question. But, wanted to know, how the big companies gain profit who run Free and Open Source project like Mozilla, Apache, etc.
They don't. They are run by non-profit organizations. Mozilla has a deal with Google to set the default search to Google, for which they get paid a hefty sum which pays for developers and infrastructure. Apache developers are paid by the companies that benefit from the project.
Redhat is an out-and-out commercial organization that offers support as a service; many big companies pay Redhat for support.
Of course, even if you are working for Free and Open source projects, there has to be some income.
Indeed. And the idea of Free Software is that you don't make money by selling software written by somebody else; you instead provide value-addition over the base software.
Nope. Free Software aka Freedom Software or Example software licensed under GPLv3 or similar license never stop you to sell a software. For example If you purchase a custom GPLv3 software from me, I will charge you heavily. But now you have a license which allow you to sell or upload somewhere on web to sell it free of cost. Because it never restrict you or anybody to share, automatically software become free of cost.