> if your software wasn't offered for free, nobody would use it because someone else would offer their alternative for free.
That suggests there's never been a viable market for commercial software at all, which is obviously wrong.
That suggests there's never been a viable market for commercial software at all, which is obviously wrong.
A market implies that people are allowed to compete on price. If a participant can only compete after receiving investment from certain VCs (and otherwise can't participate, at any price point), then it's not a market.
Also I'm not claiming anything about the past. I'm just saying today, there's no market.
That's a pretty narrow definition. Markets can also compete on features.