This is another example of inventor/developers “giving away their work for free”. You probably think that they are not capitalists.

The details on why they do this are difficult for some people to understand.

They do this because the development is a community/group effort. The end result is superior to what you would get if you do it any other way. The developers are not really ‘giving it away for free’. They receive ‘payment in kind’ by others who contribute code to the effort. The people that work on these programs actually care that it works correctly since they use it. I always care more about the code I contribute to FLOSS projects than the code I am paid to write. That does not imply that I write garbage for my employer, I just don’t care about it as much.

Free as in Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) is extensively distributed using p2p technology. I was rather alarmed when I heard what Bell Canada and Comcast were doing since I knew it would block people from getting the iso’s of the latest Fedora, Ubuntu, etc. distros. All of this P2P activity is completely legal. Blocking it is an unlawful outrage.