One a much larger time scale, I think that premise still holds. Greybeards used to tell me how back in the 80s/90s "everyone" (in software) was developing & selling their custom solutions. And it was completely normal to buy your software, the OS, IDE, compilers, Browser, basically everything. But with the proliferation of free software/open source many software business models had to compete with viable free alternatives. And with big tech doing price-dumping in many markets (who still buys a browser?). So nowadays many software sub segments there exist very good solutions that are free, competing with those are super hard and only possible for very specialized niches.