>This sort of began when we all got the impression that software should be free, or that we pay a low price once and get indefinite free upgrades. When and how

>This sort of began when we all got the impression that software should be free, or that we pay a low price once and get indefinite free upgrades. When and how did that happen? SAAS has been the wet dream of the big software houses for a long time, it was just not really acceptable for people for quite a while. It's also sounds like this is about poor software developers making a living, but the reality is that software developers are amongst the highest paid professions and software companies are ruling the world and typically have the highest profits. In fact I would argue this really started to take over when investors realised that they could get insane ROI from very little investments for software companies and started to expect these kind of returns. The other thing that is driving this push is that the FANGS want to commoditize everything except for "owning" large amount of data, because that's their value add and everything else is just a cost centre for them.