It's a bit like the conspiracy that pharma companies suppress cures because ongoing treatments make more money, and it has the same main flaws. First, without

It's a bit like the conspiracy that pharma companies suppress cures because ongoing treatments make more money, and it has the same main flaws. First, without a huge amount of collusion, somebody would release the cure to beat everyone else's treatment. (Which totally does happen.) And in software, people constantly build and release tools for free while decrying paid software as evil; if neither Stallman nor Oracle is offering something, you can't bet they don't have it. Second, making these things is hard. If you talk to programmers, we link to Programming Sucks and complain about how bad our tools are and how most software is terrible. If you talk to biochemists, you'll hear all about FDA hurdles, the rising cost and difficulty of finding new drugs worth bringing to market, and how they want to find real breakthroughs but companies can't afford speculative research. So it can't really be the case that people are just casually choosing not to produce these things. Maybe there's a vast conspiracy that nobody's leaking, even when they're drunk and complaining about work at 2AM. But if it's not that, it has to be that we just don't know how to make this stuff happen.