If you mean the same thing by pay for software then I’m truly lost. I pay for loads of software. I largely find it quite affordable.
As for democratic legitimacy, I think your position is absurd. There is clearly no real public appetite to change the status quo on copyright law. If there were it would be an electoral issue, and it just isn’t.
> This argument didn't hold much water before there was a decent infrastructure of free software,…
Free software covers some basic commodity software and infrastructure needs and that’s about it. The first areas to be covered were tools and applications needed by software developers, text editors, compilers and such.
Beyond that the development of FOSS applications was very slow and incomplete. Meanwhile commercial software saw massive investment and the development of a plethora of both general and niche applications, including in many areas no FOSS applications even exist to this day.
The commercial software industry consists of hundreds of billions of dollars in investment in software globally very year. It employs many tens of millions of developers, but also artists, designers, researchers, QA testers, trainers, and domain experts in almost every field of human endeavour that contribute to the refinement of the software. The FOSS ecosystem is pitifully tiny in comparison and it’s finding Morris can’t hope to come close to providing a viable alternative.
I’ll give two example from personal experience. In one job I worked for an independent software vendor that developed an application for designing cellular radio networks. It used terrain data and radio propagation modelling formulas to calculate signal strength and interference maps to help cellular network companies optimise their antenna placement and orientation. This was in the late 90s. No FOSS solutions exist in this space even today, developing the software took the input from a team of radio engineers as well as developers. The company also employed professional technical writers, application support personnel, trainers, a whole ecosystem of professionals.
The next job I worked at was an ISV developing derivatives trading applications for banks, pension funds and such. The software included front ends for traders, order routing servers, and interface gateways that connected to derivatives markets all over the world. Again the input from domain experts in trading was key, software developers on their own needed help to understand what traders needed, and how markets work.
Again, no open source solutions like that exist, and I don’t see any funding model coming along to address a need like this.
Even when FOSS does address a market need for applications, it often lags decades behind commercial applications, and is highly derivative of them, simply copying commercial application designs. People simply can’t wait half a lifetime for FOSS developers to get around to addressing a requirement, when commercial vendors can marshal
Millions of dollars of investment to get useful applications to market in just a year or two.
> If you mean the same thing by pay for software then I’m truly lost. I pay for loads of software. I largely find it quite affordable.
So, you're rich, or you magically avoid the expensive software. Just as an example: Suppose I live in Peru and make the median income of ~3800 USD/year. Just a license for photoshop sets me back 252 USD/yes, or over 6.6% of my gross annual income. If you consider my taxes and very modest expenses, this becomes more like 10-15% of my free gross annual income. For a single application. Now suppose I want to buy a hundred apps or so (some subscription-based, some one-off). I won't be able to repay the debt before I'm dead.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, clearly enough people do pay for commercial software to fund it's development, otherwise it wouldn't get funded. Therefore, as a matter of gob-smackingly obvious reality, it is affordable enough for the model to work. I feel bad for Peruvians that can't afford it, I hope they find a way to get by, but that doesn't make the existence of commercial software a bad thing.
As for democratic legitimacy, I think your position is absurd. There is clearly no real public appetite to change the status quo on copyright law. If there were it would be an electoral issue, and it just isn’t.
> This argument didn't hold much water before there was a decent infrastructure of free software,…
Free software covers some basic commodity software and infrastructure needs and that’s about it. The first areas to be covered were tools and applications needed by software developers, text editors, compilers and such.
Beyond that the development of FOSS applications was very slow and incomplete. Meanwhile commercial software saw massive investment and the development of a plethora of both general and niche applications, including in many areas no FOSS applications even exist to this day.
The commercial software industry consists of hundreds of billions of dollars in investment in software globally very year. It employs many tens of millions of developers, but also artists, designers, researchers, QA testers, trainers, and domain experts in almost every field of human endeavour that contribute to the refinement of the software. The FOSS ecosystem is pitifully tiny in comparison and it’s finding Morris can’t hope to come close to providing a viable alternative.
I’ll give two example from personal experience. In one job I worked for an independent software vendor that developed an application for designing cellular radio networks. It used terrain data and radio propagation modelling formulas to calculate signal strength and interference maps to help cellular network companies optimise their antenna placement and orientation. This was in the late 90s. No FOSS solutions exist in this space even today, developing the software took the input from a team of radio engineers as well as developers. The company also employed professional technical writers, application support personnel, trainers, a whole ecosystem of professionals.
The next job I worked at was an ISV developing derivatives trading applications for banks, pension funds and such. The software included front ends for traders, order routing servers, and interface gateways that connected to derivatives markets all over the world. Again the input from domain experts in trading was key, software developers on their own needed help to understand what traders needed, and how markets work.
Again, no open source solutions like that exist, and I don’t see any funding model coming along to address a need like this.
Even when FOSS does address a market need for applications, it often lags decades behind commercial applications, and is highly derivative of them, simply copying commercial application designs. People simply can’t wait half a lifetime for FOSS developers to get around to addressing a requirement, when commercial vendors can marshal Millions of dollars of investment to get useful applications to market in just a year or two.