You may be wondering: Why would people spend hours of their own time to write software, carefully package it, and then give it all away? The answers are as varied as the people who contribute. Some people like to help others. Many write programs to learn more about computers. More and more people are looking for ways to avoid the inflated price of software. A growing crowd contribute as a thank you for all the great free software they've received from others. Many in academia create free software to help get the results of their research into wider use. Businesses help maintain free software so they can have a say in how it develops -- there's no quicker way to get a new feature than to implement it yourself! Of course, a lot of us just find it great fun.

You might be asking: If the software is free, then why do I have to pay a vendor for a CD, or pay an ISP for downloading?

When buying a CD, you are paying for someone's time, capital outlay to make the disks, and risk (in case they don't sell them all). In other words, you are paying for a physical medium used to deliver the software, not for the software itself.

	Note:
	When I use the word "free", I am referring to software freedom, not that it's without cost. You can read more on what I mean by "free software" and what the Free Software Foundation says on that subject.

Most software costs over a hundred pounds. How can they give it away?

A better question is how do software companies get away with charging so much? Software is not like making a car. Once you've made one copy of your software, the production costs to make a million more are tiny (there's a good reason Microsoft® has so many billions in the bank).

Look at it another way: if you had an endless supply of sand in your garden, you might be willing to give sand away. It would be foolish, though, to pay for a lorry to take it to others. You would make them come and get it themselves (equivalent to downloading off the net) or they can pay someone else to deliver it to their door (equivalent to buying a CD). This is exactly how Linux operates and why most of the CDs are so cheap (only £2 for three CDs).