>> nothing is really as it seems when you peel back the veneer Technically true, but I think this misses my point. Big businesses are complicated. Clever busin

>> nothing is really as it seems when you peel back the veneer Technically true, but I think this misses my point. Big businesses are complicated. Clever business people often compliment burger cooking businesses with franchising, real estate investing or crypto to make better businesses. I'm not saying that a profitable business model for a restaurant is trivial. It's not. What I'm saying is that restaurants have a default mode. Software generally doesn't. There are software business that operate mostly by selling software on (eg) the Apple App store. That is more exception than rule though. You're right that software business models aren't novel. Sandwich-4-cash has never been the only business model, even if you do sell sandwiches. That said, "Restaurant" is still a bad model for understanding a software business. A lot of the objections of OS specifically have very little relevance to most software "business models." Look... Apple refused to sell OSX and it's hard to say that was a bad choice considering how things proceeded. IDK if Apple ever considered open sourcing it, but either way... "How do you sell iphones when iOS is free?" is a hyperbolic question. You can sell iphones whether or not iOS is OSS. That doesn't mean it's a good or bad business choice. It just means it's a possible, non absurd business choice.