Why do we think all software should be free, and then think that those that don't give it away are the abnormal ones?
Free software, like open science, clearly has something going for it pragmatically. The developer hours put into it have paid for themselves magnitudes of times over. Megacorps hire people to work on free software. If you can't see the value, that's a you problem.
It will be interesting to see if this is the case in the long run, assuming "huge" has a positive connotation in your post, of course.
If AGI comes to pass and it winds up being a net negative for humanity, then the ethics of any practice which involves freely distributing information that can be endlessly copied for very little cost must be reevaluated.
Increasingly, I am not putting much weight in any predictions about whether this will happen in the way we think it will, or what it could possibly mean. We might as well be talking about the rapture.
For now that is fiction, but so is "if all software was free". I do think though that both would lead to a faster rate of innovation in society versus one where critical information is withheld from society to pay someone's rent and food bills.
This is somewhat analogous to music or books/literature. Most composers and performers and authors make no money from people copying and sharing their works. Some pay the bills working professionally for entities who want their product enough to pay for it; some do other things in life. Some indeed give up their work on music because they can't afford to not do more gainful work. And still, neither music nor books go away as copying them gets closer to being free.
Why do people return Windows laptops when they have to pay for a Windows License Activation? Because every single OEM pays for it; you don't expect to buy Windows because it is a failed B2C business model. Nobody wants it. Same goes for proprietary UNIX, and people wish it was the case for Nvidia drivers. I own CUDA hardware and lament the fact that cross-industry GPGPU died so FAANG could sell licensed AI SDKs. The only thing stopping AI from being "free" is the limitations OEMs impose on their hardware.
> that those that don't give it away are the abnormal ones?
They are. Admit it; the internet is the new normal, if your software isn't as "free" as opening a website, you're weird. If I have to pay to access your little forum, I won't use it. If I have to buy your app to see what it's like, I'll never know what you're offering. Part of what makes Nvidia's business model so successful is that they do "give away" CUDA to anyone that owns their hardware. There is no developer fee or mandatory licensing cost, it is plug-and-play with the hardware. Same goes for OpenAI, they'd have never succeeded if you had to buy "the ChatGPT App" from your App Store.
The internet echo chamber strikes again. Exactly how many people are actually doing this? Not many, and those that are all hangout together. The rest of the world just blindly goes about their day using Windows while surfing the web using Chrome. Sometimes, it's a good thing to get outside your bubble. It's a big world out there, and not everybody sees the world as you do
Paying for Windows? I think you missed my point. If your computer doesn't ship with an OS, paid or otherwise, people think it's a glitch. The average consumer will sooner return their laptop before they buy a license of Windows, create an Install Media from their old device and flash the new hardware with a purchased license. They'll get a Chromebook instead, people don't buy Windows today.
The internet has conditioned the majority of modern technology users to reject and habitually avoid non-free experiences. Ad-enabled free platforms and their pervasive success is all the evidence you need. Commercial software as it existed 20 or 30 years ago is a dead business. Free reigns supreme.
What nonsense. Go into any business and you will find every single piece of software they use is bought and paid for with bells on. The 'Free World' you speak of is only there to get you, an individual, used to using the software so that businesses are made to purchase it. In the old days we called this 'demo' or 'shareware'. Now its 'free' or 'personal' tier subscription.
Go and ask any designer if their copy of Adobe Creative Cloud, 3d studio Max, or AutoCAD is free. Any office worker if Micsrosoft Office(including Teams and Sharedpoint etc) or even google docs for business. Majority of developers are running paid versions of Jetbrains. Running an online shop? Chances are you are paying for shopify software, or something like Zoho to manage your customers and orders.
'Free' as you put it is very much only in the online individual consumer world, a very small part of the software world.
The commercial software market is more alive and expensive than it has ever been.
These all have the property which is that they are scarce physical goods or services. Software is not scarce (though of course the labor to create it is), so this is a really bad comparison.
And again I did not say it should or should not be free, I said there are engineering benefits to open source software and more and more people recognize those benefits and choose to make things free because they see the value and are willing to recognize the tradeoffs. I never said what "should" be done. "Should" is kind of a nonsense term when used in this way as it hides a lot of assumptions, so I generally do not use it, and notably did not use it in my comment. I want to point out the peculiarity in your rather strong response to a word and concept I never used. I think you are having an argument with imagined people, not a discussion with me.
And for what it is worth, I am a robotics engineer and I am designing a completely open source solar powered farming robot designed to be made in a small shop in any city in the world (see my profile), funded by a wealthy robotics entrepreneur who recognizes the value in making this technology available to people all over the world.
So I am one of those engineers making this choice, and not someone just asking for things without doing the same of my work. Everything I produce is open source, including person projects and even my personal writing.