That is certainly one interpretation of it. Most of the opensource projects I'm familiar with don't compete directly with a proprietary model. > Certainly many

That is certainly one interpretation of it. Most of the opensource projects I'm familiar with don't compete directly with a proprietary model. > Certainly many contributors to open source projects have been motivated by not wanting to pay for software. That hasn't been the case for most projects I see. Most developers can afford to pay for proprietary software. Yet they choose to work on opensource, why is that? I can purchase 1 month of Adobe CC with less than 15 minutes of work. Why spend years, months and days developing and debugging an open source image editor? > most of the users of open source software have been motivated by not wanting to pay for software as opposed to a desire to read or modify the source code. Most users would pirate the cracked version of the proprietary software (i.e. Photoshop, Windows) rather than use something like GiMP or Ubuntu. If money is the motivation there is a lot less friction in sticking to cracked Windows than opensource ArchLinux. > Freeware has been around since the beginning of software, open source is a more scalable way of doing it. Not sure what this means. Freeware can be put on an FTP server or repo and and downloaded quickly. What is the scaling issue?