> Because you don't offer something for free if you have the expectation of being paid for it. Actually, lots of companies offer services for free with the exp

> Because you don't offer something for free if you have the expectation of being paid for it. Actually, lots of companies offer services for free with the expectation that, at some point in the future, they will paid for it. Likewise, many open-source projects offer the core software for free and make money by selling themes/plugins, offering paid support, building other services on top of the open-source software, etc. Whether you can pull it off depends a lot, of course, on what kind of software it is and who the target users are. Maybe this is feasible only for a small subset of open-source projects. But it's doable. It's been done. Heck, I'm doing it myself. So please don't dismiss this kind of business model too quickly.