Information work has always been weird (software, writing, composing music, etc.) Software is not a thing in the same sense a chair is a thing, making copies c

Information work has always been weird (software, writing, composing music, etc.) Software is not a thing in the same sense a chair is a thing, making copies cost nothing and that has two effects: you can build much more complex things, copies are dirt cheap. It's the old discussion in the 90s of bits vs atoms. When you copy a bit, the original bit stays there, nothing is lost, so we implement artificial scarcity (in the form of copyrights) to encourage production. Copying bits is easy, almost effort free, once you make one of the thing, making millions is cheap and easy, no matter how hard it was to make the first one. It's not the same with a chair, making the first is marginally harder than making the second, but the difficulty of making copies doesn't radically diminish after you made the first one. Integrated circuits, 3D printed stuff, and so on, are in the middle, they're atoms, but behave much closer to bits. Once you make the first one, making more is relatively cheap and easy. If you think of complexity, the easier something is to copy and tweak, the faster the complexity increases, that is a side effect of sharing, where more minds can improve on the thing. Software is at one end of the complexity spectrum, and chairs are at the other.