> If there would be no open source, people would pay for libraries.
Nonsense. The cost of creating non-trivial software (say, 20+ dependencies, all needing payment) would put software out of the reach of ordinary people, meaning that there will only be a small niche of developer jobs.
Which means that most people making a non-zero income from writing software today would have been making a zero income from writing software in your hypothetical alternate universe.
There's a lot of butterfly-effect type results as well - due to how capitalism works, the majority of people who are capable of writing software would never be able to compete - whoever the bug players are, they could simply buy them out, shut them down or even product-dump.
FOSS levels the field somewhat: FOSS is a force multiplier, in that whatever FOSS creates can be used to create more software (even non-FOSS), reducing the dependency on one or two incumbents who were lucky enough to get there first and cornered the market.
Without FOSS, we'd all be running IE6 on Windows 98, because there'd be no competition.
I think you have issues with interpreting the idea as a whole, so you cling to one sentence and base some totally out of touch assumption on that very sentence.
Nonsense. The cost of creating non-trivial software (say, 20+ dependencies, all needing payment) would put software out of the reach of ordinary people, meaning that there will only be a small niche of developer jobs.
Which means that most people making a non-zero income from writing software today would have been making a zero income from writing software in your hypothetical alternate universe.
There's a lot of butterfly-effect type results as well - due to how capitalism works, the majority of people who are capable of writing software would never be able to compete - whoever the bug players are, they could simply buy them out, shut them down or even product-dump.
FOSS levels the field somewhat: FOSS is a force multiplier, in that whatever FOSS creates can be used to create more software (even non-FOSS), reducing the dependency on one or two incumbents who were lucky enough to get there first and cornered the market.
Without FOSS, we'd all be running IE6 on Windows 98, because there'd be no competition.