Software was originally free. It was necessary to use the machines so it was supplied by their makers. (I worked at IBM when this began to change.) It was also

Software was originally free. It was necessary to use the machines so it was supplied by their makers. (I worked at IBM when this began to change.) It was also all open source before that went away in favor of closed and proprietary licenses, which customers pushed back on greatly. While some companies do make money selling software, they're fewer and further between than ever. Most of the money in the software business is in hosting, service, support, or advertising. The biggest players in our industry make more money from that stuff than from selling licenses. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon are all software-based businesses but software licenses aren't their source of revenue. The vast majority of software is worth nothing. Statistically, most computer programs will only be used by one person -- the person who wrote them. There are millions of GitHub repos full of software with absolutely zero monetary value, as evidenced by the fact that no one pays for it. A tiny, tiny fraction of software programs reach "escape velocity" and become important enough to pay for, and to pay people to work on. This is definitely the exception and not the norm. None of this is a condemnation of software or other copyrighted works. I'm a published author and artist as well as a software developer and I definitely get it. As for our desktop software, we charge for the fact that we packaged it into the desktop version. That's human work and it was quite difficult. If you don't need that, you can get (and setup) an almost identical product for free.