Every industry seems to have gone through a similar cycles where the free has been a threat to the commercial products.
This is hilariously out of touch. Software is one of the very few industries where marginal costs of production are essentially zero. Almost everything else besides oft-derided ‘content’ requires the expenditure of variable costs (materials, energy, labour) to produce. It’s well-known that in the limit of a perfect competition environment (think scissors, white t-shirts, socks, pencils, plate glass, & cetera) sales price is driven down towards the marginal cost (variable costs) of the most efficient producer, eliminating profit.
Very few other categories of things have seen their sales prices be driven towards actual zero. In fact I’m hard-pressed to think of any.
Maybe music and video entertainment as a counter example?
Agree with everything you said though.
Free is a temporary attack vector, but with open source its a permanent attack vector.
I’m very doubtfull of that. How would a free car manufacturer work? Which free watch offering threatened the commercial industry? When did free construction threaten commercial offerings?
Free construction has a similar fate, which is why planning permission is more difficult than it has ever been.
That FOSS software is given gratis is a happy byproduct of it being libre and having zero cost to copy.
"open source" cola for example is not free to manufacture, so it has some cost associated, though you could make it yourself if you had the means.[0]
> Free construction has a similar fate, which is why planning permission is more difficult than it has ever been.
This is new to me. Planning permissions are difficult because the rulling class makes their money from owning property, and thus they prefer to keep the housing supply thight, and their wallets thick. They would do this even if the cost of construction would have increased. (Which it often did.)
As long as house prices rise fairly consistently, if you can raise additional capital chances are good it will give you better return to keep accumulating more land than use the capital to finance construction on land you already own.
I'd really like to see heavy taxation on underutilized land (insufficient to only go after unused land because then they'll just plonk down something cheap and low-density and rent it out until the time is right for something bigger.