Free software costs two million dollars

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch, as I learned a long time ago while eating my soup and being forced to listen to a product pitch from some marketing droid straight out of college. I thought I was going to get an inside edge on technology developments at the company, instead I found myself in a world of pain where apparently the use of the word 'leverage' at least twice a minute was compulsory. I mention this because I always get goosebumps when the term 'free software' is bandied about, all too aware that all too often it is nothing of the sort. From the blatant marketing message (the software is free, but then so are the adverts that eat the screen space) through to the 'actually it's a demo and you need to pay up after a month, when you've already invested your time inputting all that data' definition of free. The small print usually explains all of this, naturally enough, but then nobody reads the small print do they?