Oh what the heck, since I'm revisting this thread....

Yeah, you have a point there, when you talk about each one of the services you mentioned, Linux and down to Facebook, remember, these guys are companies, they are established as companies, they have many other sources of income and hence they could afford rendering a free service or more than one free service "or flavor", setting the standards for the industry.

Actually, "linux" [sic] isn't a company, though there are companies that create Linux distros. And Firefox is put out by the Mozilla Foundation, so once again, not a company. Companies provide funds to help these projects out and may even assign people to work on these projects but at the end of the day they are not companies. But more importantly, Perl benefits in the same way! Furthermore, PerlMonks is part of The Perl Foundation, which makes it similar to the Mozilla Foundation.

Your comments may make sense for the rest of the list, but they are way off-base for Linux and Firefox.