Sometimes people seems irritated, that i work for "nothing" instead to earn money with my programs. In the following i'll try to explain my reasons...
At first it's become a habit - already if i programmed some DOS-tools for my own, my friend could not only use them, but i expanded the programs for them, too, although some extensions were not really interesting for myself.
Hamster was the logically continuation: Because Haible offered it as freeware, it was naturally to offer Korrnews and following tools as freeware, too. At this point i didn't sense, how many new additions to this tools would follow, but i don't feel remorse for my decision. And as actual Maintainer of Classic-Hamster i won't change it's state, i can promise, that Hamster will remain freeware in the future.
But why so much work without money for that? Well, it's true, that there's no money (ok, i got sometimes little presents like a coupon for a book or delicious marzipane), but many other things: Much praise and "glory" (much more as an commercial developer!), many, many "customers", and as freeware-developer I can decide when and what i do, because nobody has any rights to prescribe this. Furthermore it's a very good reference...
But on the other side freeware can save time and work - you get bugreports very fast, you get tons of new ideas and especially the project "Hamster" works, because there are many other people, who add new functions, find and correct bugs, works at parts of the program, which i won't try to change for myself, writes and updates online help (thanx to Joern Weber for the german help, perhaps we'll find somebody for the english help in the next years, too...) and web sites etc pp...