As an entrepreneur/programmer who makes a good living from writing and selling software, I'm dumbfounded as to why developers write applications and then put them up on the Internet for free.  You've found yourself in one of the most lucrative fields in the world.  A business with 99% profit margin, where you have no physical product but can name your price; a business where you can ship a buggy product and the customer will still buy it.

Occasionally some of our software will get a free competitor, and I think, this guy is crazy.  He could be making a good living off of this but instead chose to make it free.  


Do you not like giant piles of money?
Are you not confident that people would pay for it?  
Are you afraid of having to support it?


It's bad for the business of programming because now customers expect to be able to find a free solution to every problem. (I see tweets like "is there any good FREE software for XYZ? or do I need to pay $20 for that".) It's also bad for customers because the free solutions eventually break (because of a new OS or what have you) and since it's free, the developer has no reason to fix it. Customers end up with free but stale software that no longer works and never gets updated. Customer cries. Developer still working day job cries in their cubicle. What gives?

PS: I'm not looking to start an open-source/software should be free kind of debate. I'm talking about when developers make a closed source application and make it free.

Sharing

Most of us make use of software that has been provided to use free of charge. As a result, it makes sense to share our own software free of charge as well. Basically, we are exchanging our software for the other free software but without the overhead of actually going through a transaction. There will be leaches who do not contribute, but since distribution is so cheap that does not matter.

Selling is Hard

Actually trying to sell software makes the process much more difficult as you have to market, collect money, and worry about the legal ramifications of selling to people. For a lone programmer this takes them away from what they really want to be doing. As a result they may release their program simply so that other people can have benefit even if they cannot.

A New Model

It might be argued that a new model of software development is arriving. The model of selling software is an attempt to take physical-world selling and apply it to software. However, software is not like the physical world. Because distribution is so cheap a couple of issues arise. 


Letting someone use your software is basically free for you.
Attempting to prevent people who haven't paid for the software from using it is really expensive.


Under this view, attempting to charge per copy of the software is a losing game. Thus you should attempt to make money on software-related services, not software itself. Thus you might charge for a support contract, hosting services, etc. rather than the right to use the software itself.

Incidentally, this model is used by webcomics, web series, etc. which give the primary product away for free and sell related merchandise.
