I geuss I just don't fully understand this. Can someone explain to me the driving force behind open source? Why would someone want to create something in open source? Is it just to get a userbase before starting to charge? Am I missing the obvious?
In the world of open source, developers are not driven by money. Open source software is developed to be used, not to be sold. The software is better because anyone can use it, change it, modify it, better it, find bugs.
Most scripts and software are open source. You see that all the time on picture image sites, arcarde sites, etc. One person creates the program, releases it, and a thousand people get it and start improving on it... Those that improve the best (or are great sellers) will then sell the program.
Open source is heaven. Because you have so many people contributing, you have things that can grow quickly, lots of people to find bugs, fix them, and you end up with something way better, etc. Open source gives me faith in mankind.
Yep you are right. They keep their sites running through donations normally or through the use of ads they sell on the site in some cases. There have been cases of some taking their product from free to charge, but very few ever do this since the idea is to create a product for the masses to use and improve for free.
Let's take Redhat as an example: Red hat did not sell software. While thery released Red Hat Linux every year, they had all kinds of paid developers constantly updating their code and increasing performance etc. How did they get the money? Well, Redhat made their product available in two ways. First of all, Redhat Linux could be downloaded free from their website, with all available documentation. However, for those people who didn't have the time to download the software, or also wanted a printed copy fo the documentation etc. they made the software available in the stores as well, for $60 or so. The $60 was not to pay for the operating software itself, but to cover the costs of the disc media, the printing costs for the documentation, and the cost of transporting this package to the stores. Another way they made money was they developed and enterprise level Linux called 'Redhat Enterprise Linux' (RHEL). RHEL is aimed at large businesses and corporations, looking to use Linux in a corporate environment. They strengths of it are that it is built to network exremely well, and has a lot of useful collaboration enhancements and what not making it very popular. This again, they give away free, but in most cases, the companies which begin to implement RHEL also purchased a service contract with Redhat so that they have someone to call in case things go wrong. This was the main money maker for Redhat, and it was on the strength of this that Redhat was sold a couple years ago for a couple hundred million dollars. Generally, open source is divided into two types of people: those who do it for the community, and those who realize it as a valid business model in that they can sell their consulting services to assist companies looking to implement their open source software. I hope that clears things up a bit.
Open Source does not necessarily mean free. There are various open source implementations. The main thing about open source is that the creators allow the general public access to the source code of the applications. This allows a large collection of people to contribute, add and improve the program. While there are lots of free open source programs out there, open source should not be viewed as "everything's free".
Well with open source stuff you could always make it so people using your software have to leave a link to your site, if it gets big enough you'll get a ton of backlinks and higher PR (ie PHPBB.com) - that'd be a good way to cash in a bit.