> There’s a deep paradox in our industry: software and software services are extremely expensive, yet people have been conditioned to expect them to be either free or very cheap.
Software has potentially very high fixed costs but near zero marginal unit cost, and prices in a competitive market are driven down to marginal costs; more quickly if the N+1st competitors fixed costs are substantially lower than the Nth competitor for some N value(s) of N.
Sofware services have higher fixed and unit costs, and are designed to limit competition compared to actually selling software, but if the underlying software is open source still suffer (from the seller’s perspective) from the above for N=1.
High fixed costs, low marginal unit costs do seem like the sort of thing that ends up tax funded in a lot of cases. Like basic science (distributing the results if cheap), the electrical grid (one more connection is usually cheap enough), etc.
Software has potentially very high fixed costs but near zero marginal unit cost, and prices in a competitive market are driven down to marginal costs; more quickly if the N+1st competitors fixed costs are substantially lower than the Nth competitor for some N value(s) of N.
Sofware services have higher fixed and unit costs, and are designed to limit competition compared to actually selling software, but if the underlying software is open source still suffer (from the seller’s perspective) from the above for N=1.