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Valid point but should all upgrades be non-free? The most notorious free upgrade systems are the open source communities. They are mostly back by a company (eg Canonical, Red Hat) with paid developers, but take for example RHEL, who benefits immensely from the open source version Fedora where the community of non-paid developers have a passion for the project.

I guess if you have passion, does the amount of money matter?

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Give me free "point releases" or maintainence releases. Make a "named" release a big deal with significant upgrades so I feel good about spending more money.

Completely agree, money isn't the only motivating factor for continued development. But it's easy to get burned out on big projects (see TextMate 2), or move on to other projects.

With time being such a valuable resource for any developer, unless the product is a side hobby or the dev has special circumstances (rich, etc), money is a big factor in deciding what to work on.

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