> If one insists that all software must be free then all development needs to occur as free time hobby activity. I don't agree with this[1]. R&D in a competiti

> If one insists that all software must be free then all development needs to occur as free time hobby activity. I don't agree with this[1]. R&D in a competitive environment can probably me modeled by the prisoners dilemma, where full cooperation is the most rewarding play but is not an equilibrium. Free software attempts to solve this by changing the rules and allowing only cooperation, thus ensuring everyone the highest reward (eg medium investment and high-quality IP). This could be seen as beneficial by commercial actors as it doesn't question commercial value per se, only commercial value of intellectual property. The problem i see is not scaling, it's time constraint: if you want something quick, the only way to force it is to make it yourself, eg high investment. If the result contains some IP you have little incentives to make it free. So i would refine your statement as: new and emerging free software must be developed either in free time or slowly. Which is pretty much natural when you think about it: transitioning between "IP has value" to "IP has no value" will be hard and slow. But the more things are free, the more it will be easy to make things free. The only real obstacle to that model are monopolistic actors capable of huge investment (eg make something non-free in a free world), but it's no news that monopolistic actors are bad for the commons and should be broken up for tons of different reasons. [1] Actually since FS can be seen as part of a vision which challenges our current work-based society, it actually could occur all in "free time". But this is to distinguish from hobby activity: the first is productive while the second is not.