Depends on who your target market is. People with a certain level of technical skill can take open source software and make it work for their own purposes. They

Depends on who your target market is. People with a certain level of technical skill can take open source software and make it work for their own purposes. They generally won't pay. But, the business owner, the average person in the street, they don't have the skills to read the documentation, to fiddle with the installation dependencies, etc. For them, paying for software that gets the job done is effectively paying somebody to do for them what they cannot do and are disinclined to do. If you "just sell software" to those types of people then you need to make sure that it is very easy to install and get operating. That requires a lot of work and testing and even then you need to provide support. That is why you charge for software. To give you an analogy, there are people who will buy an old car, fix it and be happy to drive it. They are not the same people who buy brand new luxury cars. The latter will probably never pop the hood. The former will frequent forums to share tuning and modification tips. Very different target markets.