Comment by gtsop
7 hours ago
> In some ways software is really fundamentally different from things like baking or plumbing
You were onto something with this but then got sidetracked.
The fundamental difference is that software (digital product) is cannot be given away and cannot be consumed, it can only be copied. Any other non-digital product, a bread loaf, a pipe, for someone else to use it, you have to give it away. You must not own the bread anymore so that the other person owns and uses it. Not the same with software since you never give away software, you give a free copy that costs nothing. Both you, the creator and the user now have a copy of the same thing and can use it indefinitely (this is the second difference, it is not consumed)
This is the fundamental difference that "disrupts" the classic capitalist economic flow. The proof of this disruption can be found in the continously changing pricing strategy of digital products and software, since companies are trying to adjust a fundamentally different product onto classical economic transactions.
The solution is a communist economy, where money won't be a transaction wall for product exchange and one's well being (as opposed to having to make money to live by)
I don't think it is this novel anymore though. Which easier and cheaper distribution, the same thing is starting to apply to other creative endeveours like music, art, or writing, where the costs of publishing start to get negligible, while there is an ever growing base of creatives who want to ofer their work to an audience. And maybe we should treat Open Source more like other art forms, where you get patronage, or get small payments per download like in the shareware model.
While I find speculating about different models besides capitalism a good exercise, I also don't think these things are wholy incompatible with our current societal structure.