> Certainly many contributors to open source projects have been motivated by not wanting to pay for software. This is just not the case anymore. I know tons of

> Certainly many contributors to open source projects have been motivated by not wanting to pay for software. This is just not the case anymore. I know tons of people who choose to work on open source and I pretty sure none of them did it because of money. I guess it's might be like that 25-30+ years ago for the people who started GNU and Linux ecosystems when vendor lock-in was big deal and a lot of programming tools were proprietary and expensive include compilers. And 14 years back when I started to work in web development there was similar situation where a lot of tools and software is proprietary and expensive. Not anymore. > And many if not most of the users of open source software have been motivated by not wanting to pay for software as opposed to a desire to read or modify the source code. For initial adoption this is still true, but I believe many people who stick with open source products doing it for entirely different reasons. As others pointed out it's might be not the case in rich 1st world countries, but everywhere else people just go with illegal software instead of open source.