I don't think a generation has been tricked into giving "free" (as in beer) software; I think the generation brought it on themselves, and continues to do so. W

I don't think a generation has been tricked into giving "free" (as in beer) software; I think the generation brought it on themselves, and continues to do so. We've always been free (as in speech) to charge money for our free (as in speech) software. People are very eager to work for free on free (as in speech) software just for the pats-on-the-back from "the community", it seems to me, at least as often as people do it because they're truly passionate about their craft. With the rise of "have a github profile/opensource contributions" in job posting descriptions, it's only going to get worse. "Open source" is very rapidly becoming the "unpaid internship" model of hiring and distributing work in the software industry, and it breeds a sort of contempt for the notion of receiving compensation for one's efforts. I'm not sure that's a good thing with all the very-much-for-profit activity around software development.