Comment by Ekaros
17 days ago
Money must come from somewhere. And by selling a product I mean a phone. Or box doing something. With Wine, well Valve sells games and want those games to run on something else than platform they were build for.
In the end product is being sold originally to fund that development. Software can also be pure product enabling company to do something or consumer to do something. But in that case open-source is likely incidental. Not the product.
In your first comment you said, "why would I pay for [software] if it is provided for free?" And you're right, you don't. What you pay for is for someone to develop software/features that don't exist yet. Maybe the users of the phone you sell want some new feature. Then it's done and everyone's happy and even better you don't need to pay for the entire project to be built from scratch or pay ongoing license fees or whatever. That's how you monetize open source.