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What happens though when it becomes uneconomical to produce much of the software we take for granted? Sure to an extent the race to the bottom can be sustained

• kiba 16y ago
  What happens though when it becomes uneconomical to produce much of the software we take for granted? Sure to an extent the race to the bottom can be sustained due to a large ecosystem of developers but eventually something has to give, developers have to put food on the table. Sure, if you're trying to alway sell digital goods at a price. However, you could try to sell things that are actually scarce and less likely to be driven down to marginal cost such as your programming services. There are bunch of business that require custom made software and they're not going to get it by pirating software.
• kragen 16y ago
  The software we take for granted has already been written. There is no danger that it will become uneconomical to make more copies of it. It may be uneconomical to write certain new pieces of software, but that's not software we're currently taking for granted. The majority of software development, something like 90%, is already bespoke project work, which doesn't depend on copyright to fund it. In fact, the more freely we can copy software, the more value we can produce in bespoke project work. Django, Linux, Firefox, and SQLite make it possible for me to toss together a simple CRUD web site in 45 minutes.