Programmers' love for "free" software is one of the strangest things to happen to any industry in history. It's like...winemakers refusing to pay 20 dollars for the occasional bottle, but forgetting that they sell a million/year to the public. You lose on one side more than you save on the other.
What's odd is that it varies by community. The Mac software world has been dominated by shareware throughout its existence, and even now it's fairly easy to convince a Mac owner to buy a piece of $20 software that is slightly better than the free alternatives.
The glib explanation for this is that cheapskates don't tend to buy Macs in the first place. I don't think that's the whole story by any means, but it's certainly a start.
Development tools tend to be an exception in general. Apple provides lots of development tools free of charge, ostenisbly because it's good for the Apple platform if more programs are written, thus attracting more users... but on the other hand, Apple charges a non-trivial amount for their other professional software packages.
Microsoft doesn't give away as much in the way of development tools (just "lite" versions, I guess), but maybe they don't think they have to, since they already are the dominant platform?...
That may be, but that attitude pushes away prospective developers. When I was a budding programmer the only way I knew of to access a C compiler was to use the GNU toolchain. But getting it to work on Windows was enough trouble that I just made the move to Linux. It's been ten years now, and I've never looked back. It's Microsoft's loss.
Microsoft does actually give a way a lot of development tools for free including compilers. The only thing they don't give away is their IDE. Even in that case they do give away versions of it that are only somewhat crippled but still very usable.
