Free enterprise and profit

I really struggled with the concept of people offerring so much information without a price. Skeptic that I am. It began to make sense to me after reading about Behlendorf who created the Apache web server. He never made any money off of it and people questioned why (me included). But the book goes on to say how Behlendorf went on and created a new successful company and that might not have been possible had he not become so well known for creating Apache.