this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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That is most likely going to generate less revenue than promoting donations, or a comparable amount at best. WinRAR is the meme example.
From a PR and marketing perspective, if I wanted to maximize my revenue as a single developer I would set up a Patreon or encourage recurring donations through the software by providing bragging rights stuff (merch, insider access, early access to unfinished builds and so on). Single mandatory payments simply reproduce the piracy/license access of commercial software and shaming people into paying without coercion just makes you seem less appealing to people who would donate anyway.
Free Software can be legally distributed (it's one of the 4 essential freedoms that it gives you). It doesn't matter if it's commercial or not, someone can always give you a copy.
There is a game called Mindustry, which is a libre game that is sold one Steam and it seems to be doing fine. This is just one example of a commercial Free Software project.