It’s not that pie can’t be duplicated, it’s that there are real costs to the duplication. And making pies precisely the same is surprisingly hard (pie is my favorite treat and I make them all the time).
Not so with software. Duplication and distribution are essentially free. Copies are perfect replicas. Why not then insist on the best version? Also, with food, the varied experience of slightly different pies is fun (“variety is the spice of life”). Unless I expected variation in my software, I would be extremely annoyed that it did not do what I wanted.
Maybe I'm wrong—probably am—but isn't the article talking about something else? He's not talking about making a copy of a piece of software as a perfect replica. I think he's talking about coding something that is not conceptually different from something that was already existing.
Not so with software. Duplication and distribution are essentially free. Copies are perfect replicas. Why not then insist on the best version? Also, with food, the varied experience of slightly different pies is fun (“variety is the spice of life”). Unless I expected variation in my software, I would be extremely annoyed that it did not do what I wanted.