I believe there are ways to develop free software for money. If you're a
freelance developer, you can create your own website on where you should
offer information yourself, e.g. what skills, experiences you have, and where
one can hire your services (this approach is popular these days). You can
also develop applications, and offer them free (in both senses), then ask for
money for further development, and enhancements (e.g. make a list of most
requested features, and the pricing in a similar fashion like at
https://trisquel.info/tasks). If you have the ability, you can also offer
support for companies on specialized free software application (this includes
both software development, and technical help). Maybe you can also get a job
at FSF, where there is a widespread selection of software projects on what
you can work on (depending on your preferences). All of this depends on what
kind of software you're developing (if I remember correctly, they were mobile
applications), if you're developing from scratch, or porting desktop programs
to mobile operating systems, forking/enhancing existing projects, etc., and
of course, on reallife situation/limitations. Also, you can release the code
on GitHub, or some other revision control system (e.g. GNU Savannah - a
software development management system), and dual-license your application
under both free/non-free licenses, while the proprietary counterpart will be
available pre-compiled on the app store, therefore the average people will
still buy your program, since they obviously doesn't want to struggle with
building stuff. And so on...
If you're a proprietary software developer, I encourage you to add a
time-based promise to your license, that will ensure that after a period of
time, all the code will be released as free software. This way, even if
you're struggling because you cannot make living out of development of FLOSS,
it will both encourage users to buy your program in some way, but most
importantly, this ensures that after the program served its purpose, it will
eventually became free. I wish most of the proprietary software developers
will follow the same route.
Regerds,
Peter
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