Yes. People have a tendency to want to be paid for their work, equipment usually costs money to acquire, and raw materials almost never come for free (if only b

Yes. People have a tendency to want to be paid for their work, equipment usually costs money to acquire, and raw materials almost never come for free (if only because there are the aforementioned people and equipment involved). Even if it's proving easy to lower the cost of producing each additional unit, driving the fixed costs to zero will, I think, prove much harder. From the point of view of the producer (as I think is your point) the whole thing is moot. Your costs are £(fixed_cost+num_units*marginal_cost), broadly speaking, and if marginal_cost ends up zero then you still need to pay for the people and the equipment. The likelihood of each unit actually costing the customer zero are... well... zero. And to my eyes that means that overall nothing is going to change. This is unlikely to be news to anybody that runs a software company, which is a good example of a business that has long had large fixed costs and low costs per unit. However much each unit costs, you've spent money to make it, and that money has to come from somewhere. I'm sure Intel and the like have also got a good deal of experience of spending vast amounts on R&D and fab setup so that they can produce a chip for £0.10 that they then have to sell to you for £500 if they're to make any money out of it. But I suppose this could be news to people running a non-profit?