nymia: I wrote a Photoshop plugin that's downloaded 100 times a day. It's free. If I had put even a very modest sticker price on it, I'd be lucky to get one download a day. I decided that a comparatively large benefit to "the all" was preferable to a small benefit to me.

(update) nymia: The benefit I receive is the traffic. There are a couple of commercial and donation-ware plugins available from the same page, which should account for a small trickle of compensation flowing back from the free-loaders? It will never pay my mortgage, but it is -something-. After all, I only wrote the software once, if I get paid 100,000 times that might not be ethical. I don't want the bad Karma of uber-thief Gates and his kind.