Comment by tliltocatl

The marginal cost of software is zero and therefore the just price in a perfect market is zero. You can compete on delivering features quickly (and that's how all 80-00s software was - they were able to charge simply because no one was offering same features yet), but other than that there is no way software can be a profitable product without being a monopoly - and monopolies is not a thing to be tolerated. You can sell customer support, you can sell services, you cannot really sell software forever. Hate this as much as you want, but that's how things are.