It actually does have to do with price. All free software is one user away from the possibility (likelihood) it is free as in beer.
The parent comment is correct that free software has put magnitudes less food on kids bellies.
The parent comment is correct that free software has put magnitudes less food on kids bellies.
And yet, my and others' salaries have been paid for over six years writing free software without it ever being published publicly by its users, despite being GPL licensed.
It's true that our customer base is not very large, though.
At the same time it empowered those who could not afford to pay or could not pay (legal/geo-restrictions, DRM etc).
uh... citation needed?
How many open source companies are there? By open source company I mean companies whose each software product is open source. How many are public companies? Maybe, even just compare those to companies who's products are "open core", which seems to include most (all?) of the open source SaaS offerings.
Or look just at the largest public software companies and estimate their commoditization through open source and community participation through open source.