Bullshit. Free market or not, that's an entirely one dimensional view on the value of software. Plenty of software has value -- the software that makes a business more productive, competitive or saves it money has inherent value, not to mention applications in other areas.

Competent business owners, managers and technical people making decisions about the implementation of software are very interested in the value of that software and its value to business is exactly why we have an economy that exchanges money for these things.

I wasn't just talking about software. I was talking about movies, books, music, images, anything that can be digitized. As soon as it's digital, there's a nearly infinite supply. Unless you can find a way to limit that supply the price (sorry, I meant price when I said value) will drop to zero. We currently have legal methods of limiting that supply -- by giving the creator legal control of how digital things get copied. But the difficulty of stamping out piracy even with these legal counter-measures is a testament to how artificial that really is.

There are some cases where it is possible to limit the supply of digital goods, and this is best seen in software where access to the code can be limited or the code can be written to be restricted in some way, especially in compiled software or web applications. But this, too, can often be hacked.

Note, I'm no fan of free markets. I think they are an enormously clumsy tool for linking 'price' to 'value'.

Fair enough. I really thought you were advocating something else.

> Anything digital is inherently valueless. There is no cost to copy it.

Wouldn't books, then, only be "worth" the cost of the paper on which they're printed? How does making something digital automatically destroy any inherent value?

Sorry, I meant price where I said value and now can't edit it.

But look at it this way, for anything digital the supply is infinite. We currently have legal methods of restricting the supply and some attempts at software or digital methods of restricting it. But even so, the difficulty we've had stamping out illegal piracy is a testament to how artificial and fragile these methods are. With truly infinite supply, the price will always be zero. Why should I pay for something I can create copies of with 'cntrl+c' and 'cntrl+v' ? The only thing that leads me to pay for basically anything is that I can't simply recreate it on my own. The day 3D printers reach the versatility of Star Trek replicators is the day a price based market economy will collapse completely. With infinite supply, there's no need to pay for anything.

(By 'value' you mean 'price' -- copies certainly have value, but they just have a near zero market price, ideally.)

Fair. Thank you for the correction. But I think this is, personally, one of my problems with free market economics. It conflates value and price too much. If you make a piece of software, or music, or a book and cannot control it's being copied, then how can a market assign value to it? The price is zero. Period. It's free. Unless you can somehow prevent it from being copied. And even with the restrictions of law, we've seen that that is nearly impossible.

The only reason price based markets even work for any other sort of exchange is because there is limited supply. With anything digital the supply is inherently unlimited.