Its an old adage:
You get what you pay for.
It means that free stuff is useless. Why would anybody who is doing anything good do it for free? If that free product is so good, why aren’t they charging for it?
But, as we have learned from Linux, Wikipedia, and a million other free things on the internets,
Free rocks.
Why is free stuff so good or often better than things you have to pay for?
The people that make free stuff actually give a shit. They love it so much they will do it with no paycheck.
If they love something that much, they are probably pretty damn good at it.
The people that make free stuff work in very small teams that are loosely connected to a larger project. Small teams get things done. Big teams are slow.
People who give things away for free are not trying to lock you into their business model and milk you for all you’re worth. They just want you to use what they made.
The collected wisdom of the folks on the internet ignores or deletes the bad free stuff and distributes or improves the good free stuff.
Linux and Wikipedia are great examples of all of these concepts.
This leads to a few questions. How can I use the free stuff I produce to make money? How can other people use the free stuff I produce to make money?
And, instead of giving away my stuff for free, does it make sense for me to pay people to use my products?
I would love to hear your thoughts on why people do things for free.
You may be interested in the current discussions at Dave Pollards blog
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I think you might find this a (useful albeit rather in-depth) partial answer to the issue of “why?” although not as much of the “how?” of “free”.
http://e-conomy.berkeley.edu/publications/wp/wp140.pdf
-Motts
Hey Nivi — Some additional reasons people do work for free that I can think of — in general, when the process is valuable in some other way.
People work for free in order to learn something they want to learn, try something with less risk, receive free feedback (that they might have to pay for in some way otherwise), get a foot in the door (literally, or by putting something on a resume, or whatever), connect with other people who’re into the same thing, get free work from others simultaneously, or when they benefit from the results of their own work, or benefit from / value what they contribute to. I don’t think people who do it for these reasons would in general be producing particularly good or particularly bad work.
There are probably internet examples of these you’re more familiar with than I am, but to give a non-internet example, in the architecture field it’s not unheard of (but it’s increasingly frowned upon) to hire unpaid workers, who are willing to work for the experience. You could say that they’re doing it because they love it, but they’re also doing it in order to get paid to do the same thing later.
Also, people enjoy more freedom when doing something Pro Bono (which they might, and often – in the examples I can think of – also do for pay, in another setting).
In the media industry, free content is a vehicle for advertising.
On the internet, free content or free code is a vehicle for the author’s name and reputation.
Companies also do the trick: MySql’s free gpl-licensed database is the best marketing tool for the same product under a commercial license.