software as a commodity is really whack to me in my head. it used to be that almost everything was open source and everyone contributed communally to a product to make it better, in whatever way they could. its distribution is also on such a level that it could almost be described as a post scarcity market. so charging a fuckton for software is just weird to me. and everyone does it. especially now with video games and other software packages released early with essentially zero QA testing, forcing users to do labor to make the software work.

if the users have to do labor on the product, you are just subverting the communal open source way of how software should be for personal gain. its one thing to care about your labor being valued, but its a whole different thing when you ignore the user’s labor as well (all the while devaluing the project members labor for profit). if you have a near flawless product created by a handful of people, sure, charge a premium. but dont act like we should highly value your product when QA testing by users enters in the 10s of thousands of hours.

and dont let me get started on how awesome it is to work on an open source project of a highly used free utility. even if you do only a small part of it, it makes you feel like you made something better for hundreds of people, and well, you did! and the fact that its instantaneous, with no real scarcity involved in its distribution, it makes your impact felt. and sure, the dudes that crank hundreds of hours into the utility should get paid, but its just weird as hell to me to charge the end user for a communal project. it just aint right in my head from years of just doing open source communism.