Personally, I'm not a big fan of "free" business tools in general. Open Source stuff has it's place and I ain't gonna knock products like phpAdsNew, phpBB2, osCommerce, etc. that have gone open source. But, after 20+ years of being a professional programmer I'm not about to "give away" my services that are custom tailored to a given business' needs. Hobbyist programmers need to realize that the people they are giving these "free" tools to are going to be making money off of their efforts, many will be making *serious* money off of them, so before you go and just hand over your toil and effort you should consider that getting some reward in return should be high on your priority list.
If you're not a seasoned veteran in programming and are just trying to learn then I guess maybe it'd be acceptable to do free work for the experience. However, consider this... Does McDonalds ask you to work for free while you are training on how the fry vats work?
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