> The catch-22 of this is that subscription models more-or-less can't work while ad-based business models exist. I suspect this dynamic also applies to softwar

> The catch-22 of this is that subscription models more-or-less can't work while ad-based business models exist. I suspect this dynamic also applies to software, including, perhaps counterintuitively, FOSS software. "Free" (but ad-supported) competes for attention with both paid and free (actually free). Interest in developing FOSS is lower, I would wager, when interest in using FOSS is lower, so we likely get less and worse FOSS in a world with lots of ad-supported (mostly spyware) software, than one without it.