Michael Ole Olsen has written:
>Keep the profit at work, but I certainly wouldn't charge in my sparetime
>If you code on something you are hired to do, then its fine you charge,
because you can't say what you want to code on, your employeer >decides
so
I partly agree but what would you do if you were self-employed and thus YOU would decide what you work on? Would you not put a price on your products? How would you survive? What if you were a CEO of a company with employees who need to pay for their lodging, food, want to go out and have fun from time to time, some of them having children? Would you not want to have revenue? Then your company would soon bankrupt, your employees would be angry with you and it is likely you would end up at court.
Or would you release your products as (seemingly) free and then pump ads to your users like many do (google/youtube, facebook, Skype) - well I think they are just afraid to state the simple truth to their users: "Yes, we need money to operate." If they could do that, their users would not have to see the ads (which have considerable size sometimes and some users actually have to pay the data depending on their ISP).
Yes you are right that greed on the producer side is a bad thing and we could have a lot of things working better if the community could have the source codes and stuff. I believe this is the case of some firmware. But I would also point out that greed is also on the consumer side. Everyone wants to have software for free. People don't like to pay. Sure, some can't pay and then it's wonderful they can get a free product. But some CAN pay and still are reluctant to do it and they keep thinking that one should just not pay for software - probably because it is made by the guys with big bellies, driving Porsches, sleeping with the hot models and never running out of money (well, not really I don't know what they think :-) ). Especially when you think about games where the effort and know-how to make them is just tremendous, I don't think that's right.