'Free software' is certainly bad marketing. It produces the illusion of software being gratis, that you must receive it for free. However, software, even free software, is obviously not gratis. At least, it takes time to build a piece of software, and time is money, therefore the cost of building any piece of software is greater than zero. In addition it also takes effort and talent, but we can agree these does not necessarily translate to money. But the most amazing free software packages (I'm thinking of Firefox, Gimp, Inkscape, LibreOffice, ...) do not request you to purchase them prior to downloading. How is that?
Well, the thing is that if you want to reach a wider audience, giving your product for free is the easiest path. Although this could mean that you will not get as much revenue as if you gave it in exchange for something. Take the Netscape case as an example: they wanted Microsoft not to end up dominating the web browser market, and they created the Mozilla project. They do not only provided a high quality web browser for free, but they made it free as in freedom. Therefore there is nothing bad in distributing software for free because that way you increase your user base.
Downloading free software for free is just the beginning. Once you have a piece of free software, you can distribute it freely (again, as in freedom). That is, you can distribute it gratis or in exchange of something, and you can distribute it to whoever you want (please note that distribution of some kinds of software may be prohibited by your country's law). When we do this in exchange for nothing we use to call it sharing; and we all know sharing is good.
Free distribution is therefore an intrinsic part of free software. Free software gives you freedom, and that is also good. We could say that free software is superior to proprietary software. Then why it is so difficult to make money from free software? Is the free thing the problem?
The problem is actually users. In the digital era, we have educated people to ask them this question: 'why would a pay for something I can get for free?' That's the very problem. The problem is not that software is free; free is good. The problem is they way users think. Users may not know how to write a program, but they most certainly guess that it takes time. Therefore, why wouldn't users pay for something that takes time to build, even if it is given for free? The fact that, e.g. LibreOffice, is distributed for free is not because they spend no resources in building it, it is because that way you can reach a broader audience.
Sharing is always a good thing, but we only get the most of it when we all participate. If LibreOffice developers share free copies of LibreOffice, then why wouldn't users share a part of their money with them? This mechanism empowers users because they can decide on their own how much they want to spend in software.
Here I would blame software companies more than individual users. Individual users usually also wouldn't pay for Microsoft Office, Photoshop, ... If they use Gimp and LibreOffice is just because they are tired of downloading proprietary software copies that could contain malware. However, software companies pay Microsoft, Adobe, Mathworks, ... a lot of money in software licenses. Most these companies use the GNU Compiler Collection, but I have no notice of any of them devoting time, effort, money to the GNU Project yet. Ok ok, when you buy a GNU/Linux distribution you supposedly donate money to a lot of free software projects. However, how many distributions a company buy? Because obviously they make copies internally, which is perfectly permitted. I think if companies would donate to the GCC project as much money as they spend in licenses from Microsoft, Adobe, ... by now we would have meaningful error messages from the C++ compiler...
