This is exactly what you get when you give your work away for free: your work will have zero value. Why are open source developers surprised by this simple fact

This is exactly what you get when you give your work away for free: your work will have zero value. Why are open source developers surprised by this simple fact? If somebody started giving away toilet paper for free then the value of toilet paper would go to zero. When you copy a commercial application and give it away for free (what most successful open source software does) then the value of those types of applications will go to zero. Which means that the value of the work (your work) goes to zero. Surprise surprise.