The software industry is holding back the tech industry like you cannot believe. If not for Microsoft's stranglehold on the PC during the 80s and 90s tech would be far more prevalent. Almost every security bug in an MS product was already noted and fixed in VMS and other OSes that were feature-complete before MS-DOS began.
We just happen to be in one of the first real industries (media is popular but not strictly useful, so not an industry for the purposes of this) whose product can be copied without incremental cost. Instead of throwing up artificial barriers around this to try to perpetuate our old-world business models we should be leveraging this and creating all the value we can.
Besides, making software free (by removing the ability to demand money for it) doesn't mean nobody would be paid to work on it. Many (most?) full-time Linux devs are paid. Probably 95% of software isn't a for-sale product, and of the bit that is, much of that could probably be supported other ways.
We just happen to be in one of the first real industries (media is popular but not strictly useful, so not an industry for the purposes of this) whose product can be copied without incremental cost. Instead of throwing up artificial barriers around this to try to perpetuate our old-world business models we should be leveraging this and creating all the value we can.
Besides, making software free (by removing the ability to demand money for it) doesn't mean nobody would be paid to work on it. Many (most?) full-time Linux devs are paid. Probably 95% of software isn't a for-sale product, and of the bit that is, much of that could probably be supported other ways.