The direct financial impact is one thing to consider. But another is... I'll describe it as capability, complexity, and progress. The ability for developers to

The direct financial impact is one thing to consider. But another is... I'll describe it as capability, complexity, and progress. The ability for developers to build on each other's stuff is hugely significant. Otherwise, every company reimplements the same stuff, and even for what they buy, the standard (and interoperable) solution that the industry settles on and is thus able to advance further, is determined by the vagaries of business: pricing, approach, market segmentation, lockin strategy, leaders' whims, etc. Quality factors in there somewhere. As a prominent CEO once said, "We're not here to write excellent software. We're here to write software that's better than our competitors'." Free software is more important at the foundational levels, because the virtuous cycle of endless improvement raises the baseline for everyone over time. For those of us whose livelihoods depend on software salaries, it cuts both ways. We can't get paid for writing grep, but we also don't have to spend our careers rewriting grep over and over again at different companies.