Comment by al_borland

There is value in freely available copies of software for people to learn on. This increases the number of people in the market who can use it, which in turn increases the number of businesses that can effectively run it.

I don’t think the preference for open source these days is an accident. It’s what kids learned on growing up, because it was the easiest to access, and they kept using it.

Give away the software to people learning, then change corporations to use it. The companies get changed more, and absorb the cost, because it’s subsidizing the education of their future employees.