Why would anyone give away quality free software?
One of the most common reasons why quality software is given away is to introduce people to a company's product. A free version is given away, in the hopes people will like the product so much that they will pay to upgrade to the version of the software that has additional features. Of course, if the free version was not very good quality, this plan would not work. Another variation of this marketing technique is giving away free software to simply attract people to the website, where they will see the other products that the company has to offer. The better the freeware, the more web traffic will be generated – the result is free advertising!
The second most common reason that free software is available is due to the fact that there are programmers who believe in the idea that software should be free. These programmers band together to volunteer their time to develop products that are then made available for all to use. On occasion, some of these products were originally commercial products that were unable to compete with similar products that had the overwhelming majority of the market. These commercial products were then made “open source” and the volunteers continued to enhance and develop the product. An example of this is the alternative browser Mozilla, which is originally derived from the commercial Netscape browser.
Another reason that people give away quality software is that they wrote the program for their own use and then realized that others would find it useful as well. Whether they generously decided to simply give it away, or did not have the time to spend trying to market the software themselves, the result is the same: very useful free software available for anyone willing to download that gives capabilities not available elsewhere. When someone goes to the trouble of writing a program, it is because there is a need for it. A good example of this is the unique free program that makes a breeze to see how the files on a computer's hard drive are using up the disk space, thereby enabling the computer's owner to remove unneeded, space consuming files. There is no easy way at all to do this with the software that comes with the computer.
Sometimes people write software in order to gain something else besides money. Freeware is given away because the author may want to establish himself in the Internet community as a serious and capable programmer. Others ask that they receive something in return, such as a postcard or an email, because they enjoy seeing where their software is being used all over the world. There were also programs that were written as a project in a college class, for example, and then made available to all when the class was completed. Some free computer games came into existence that way.
One type of freeware that turns up occasionally is when a program was originally written as a commercial product. This program might be very well written, but was not a financial success, which can happen for a variety of reasons not related to the quality of the software (inadequate funding, for example). There are some particularly good games that fall into this category. At some point, the owners of the program decided to simply make it available for all to enjoy at no cost.
source : *www.iwantfreeware.com/
