It seems to be a very famous question : how can free software developers make money to live. They spend a lot of time and effort on something that they'll never sell..

For one, as you get deeper into the free software world, you start to see that directed financial support is important. You start to subscribe to free software products, doing automatic monthly payments, you donate, sometimes quite a lot, to developers who make software that matters to you.

People continue to wonder how to make money in the free and open source software world. It’s dressed up in discussions of how one makes money when you give away the software for free.

Social networking, micro-blogging and other such buzzwords abound across web development these days, and the "public" is a fickle as ever.

Free software can be viewed as sort of a public good — everyone can benefit from it. Instead of paying for complete applications, buyers may wish to only pay for specific program elements they want, which the software lacks. Therein lies an opportunity to make money on free software, instead of around it.

The pragmatic and ethically-rooted world of free software might seem about as far away as possible from the highly abstract and, at times, morally dubious world of high finance. But as Richard Stallman has frequently pointed out, free software is by no means antithetical to making money: it's just a question of how you make money.

It's the big problem of the net: how do you make money if everyone can access the files you produce for free? Earning money is not evil, it makes it possible to produce more art or information. It's a waste of talent to need a day job to support what you consider your real work.

For some reason, people still can't seem to get their heads around the idea that you can make money, big money, from FOSS (Free Software/Open Source). It's a pity that more of them couldn't have been in New York City this week for the O'Reilly Money:Tech conference.

This article discuss ways on how to make a living off writing Free games. It also talked about the problems of trying to balance ethical concerns and making enough money to qualify as decent.