I personally don't mind paying for a product if it is a quality product. After all not every programmer can be expected to work free. As for OCR there are many good engines floating around such as Fine Reader, Care MTX, etc, but they are not free. Either you can purchase them, sign a NDA, and release a closed source OCR app, or you can start from scratch and take the 4 or 5 years it would take to hopefully get the quality of the pro grade OCR applications. Once you recognize time and costs of developing an OCR app a good open source OCR project would be a huge undertaking without a single return.
