It's peanuts to distribute your software to millions of people.

Yeah, fair point. I guess I was erroneously looking at that from the standpoint of the financial scale I'm working with right now (don't have a job, etc) and didn't catch myself. (Hmm. I'll keep an eye on that.)

If distributing a commercial (or enterprise) application then yeah it's peanuts (or a rounding error). Good point.

Related story about app stores.

There was a time when distributing content on Steam was free and anyone could do it.

This resulted in a lot of shit stuff, copied materials and fraud being distributed.

They introduced a $100 publication fee. As the story goes, it was very effective to stop abuse.

Interesting tidbit to file away, thanks.

Irrefutable point though - it's one thing to want something for free as a consumer, but quite a different story as a creator or developer. I totally get the rationale behind charging to keep quality high.

Charging also creates a contract and with that contract be able to enforce a minimum standard. That helps greatly too.