>Whoa! LOL
>
>The odd thing is there is a whole generation growing up now that thinks everything is free, or at most 10 bucks. I have no idea what the model of the future will be.
Presently the model is that pretty much anything online can be found for free, provided it's on a page that's studded with ads. Just try any kind of selling bytes - as services, utility software, video or audio content, online games, what have you - and you can be sure there's someone somewhere who is giving that exact thing for free, using it as bait to drive traffic, which then gives him good position to sell advertising space.
Except that anything that's used as advertising space goes down the drain. Radio is in its niche, completely unlistenable (including public - they just don't shout, but otherwise have ads just the same), TV has lost any educational content or capability to carry news.
Google has tamed the web advertising - it's been a while since the last time I saw a flashing scrolling banner; most ads are confined to margins and small frames. But then, I may as well be wrong, it's been years since I last saw any webpage unless filtered through AdBlock.
My guess about where will the software money go is that anything that's specialized and sort of complicated will get even more expensive; tools to do that will be all across the spectrum - from free to prohibitively expensive.
Free still has one cutting edge: for free, you waste pretty much the same time trying out stuff as you do going through owned tools manufacturers' pages. Sometimes it takes a whole hour to navigate through product pages and see which version of the product does what - because they're trying to maximize profit, so you have Extra Executive, Pro, Ultimate, Extra and Special - which does what? And the pricing isn't clear either (most of the time the price and product description are not on the same page), so you need to study their licensing model, then move on to the next manufacturer - before you've even tried them out. And then they may have the equivalent features, but because of trademarks etc they give them different, most often stupid and unintuitive names... could have installed and tried out the freebies while I was at it.
BTW, the story about programmers not being paid sounds sometimes like the RIAA's sad song about artists not being paid - the same artists whom they screw up any way they can. The point about open source is that it's not necessarily for free - there are always things to do that one can charge for - but that it's free, i.e. not under a corporate paw. This corporate worry about something happening out there, that they can't control and profit from, is probably the most profound sentiment in the universe.
