How do open source companies earn?

India
September 7, 2011 10:04am CST
There are many companies worldwide which are open source & distribute their products freely among customers like mozilla firefox, ubuntu & many more. How they make money to run their money? Ubuntu send their product disc worldwide freely which cost lots of money to send it to many users. How they are earning to distribute their product freely?
1 response
@rosdimy (3926)
• Malaysia
7 Sep 11
If I am not mistaken one of the ways they earn is by charging money for extra services. An example is when a client or customer wants an in-depth technical support. In many cases a customer has to fork out some money in order to get more functionality out of a software.