I’ve been listening this morning to a linux podcast and one of the participants mentioned how he can’t imagine paying for Linux or entering a serial for software he’s installing on Linux. This is a bad attitude.
Look at two of the most recognizable open source programs- Firefox and OpenOffice. Besides being open source, anything in common? Yeah- they both started life in the open source community as established, full-featured products. The owners decided to take a commercial product and open source it.
I know it’s the not popular way to think here in the open source world, but I’m quite willing to pay for software that is a good value. I reject the idea of having to buy a product to open a file, but if your software is great and helps me out I will pay for it. And I will tell others to. (Although if it has some crazy limitations like a limit on the number of times you can install it on a different computer, Adobe, I won’t go for that.)
The more app developers we can welcome to the Linux community the better. As time goes by maybe they will open source their product. Maybe they won’t. But more quality apps for Linux is a good thing. Be willing to pay.