It is not currently financially viable for all software to be free. However, A society in which it is viable for all software to be free is not terribly difficu

It is not currently financially viable for all software to be free. However, A society in which it is viable for all software to be free is not terribly difficult to imagine. (There are numerous possible scenarios, state funded works, high literacy and citizen programmers, maybe some sort of programming by the job system.) In this situation, monopolies like Google and Microsoft probably wouldn't exist at all. I think search is an excellent example, actually, of something that is required for the proper functioning of the web. It is practically a public good. If we found out Google were biasing its search results, it would be a very big deal (but how do you know it isn't?). If it were open source, we would know. I guess the question then is 'who pays for the hardware to run open source Google,' and that is a good question, to which I do not know the answer, but seeing as anyone can download the software, it seems anyone could.