>>Nothing in the OSS concept prevents people from making money: in the words
>>of the folks at the Free Software Foundation (e.g., see
>>http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html ), "'Free software' is a
>>matter of liberty, not price.
>
>So you think that Linus Torvalds is primarily out to make a lot of money?
>
>Very strange belief...
How does agreement with the first paragraph lead to a belief that Linus Torvalds is primarily out to make money? This kind of argumentation irks me, especially from someone who (should) know better.
In case you're merely unfamiliar with the OSS/FSF position, they claim that people should be able to share source code freely once its produced, but they have no problem with programmers being paid (perhaps a lot) to write the code in the first place. You just shouldn't be able to prevent other people from passing around copies of the source code once its written. There may be refinements that I'm unaware of, but that's the main thrust.
If you believe strongly enough in Free Software, in the sense that source code should be freely available, then you might actually write software that people can copy and distribute freely even though nobody is willing to pay you to do it, although you would be happy to accept payment if someone offered.
Linus may very well want to make a lot of money, just not by selling copyrighted software because he thinks it would be wrong (like I might want to get rich, just not by being a mafia hit man - rather an extreme analogy, but you get the point).
Brett