I agree with large parts of what you are saying - the law of scarcity does not apply to software. As a free software advocate however there are a lot of subtle

I agree with large parts of what you are saying - the law of scarcity does not apply to software. As a free software advocate however there are a lot of subtle questions to which I have no answer, listing them here in case others can chime in with thoughts a. Entire categories of software (debuggers, databases, compilers) are now in a state where we have trained users to expect them for free. If you like to spend most of your time writing software then the easiest way to work on such software now is to work for a large company who needs to develop such software to solve their business needs. How do we create solutions such that small indie developers can make a living building software in these categories. b. Even software that is immensely successful at getting industrial adoption struggles to get any revenue from its users. (OpenSSL / Numpy / Pandas / ZeroMQ etc). Inside a megacorp the person using the software faces an uphill battle fighting a bureaucracy to pay for software that is "free". How do we create platforms / delivery systems where large users of open source can pay for the services. c. Our collective inability to solve the basic economic problem of delivering a stable revenue for free software has unfortunate side effects where software moves into the cloud or becomes a service because that is the only way to get users to pay on a recurring basis. In my mind this is unfortunate because it lessens the amount of control on execution that the end user has. d. Developer tools still strongly resemble what was available in the 70s / 80s. I suspect some of this has to do with the fact that there is no easy business model for building developer tools.