Is software industry the archetype to prove that Karl Marx wasn't wrong after all...

This is why SaaS prints money? I doubt you understand Marx in the first place.

Haters on suicide watch.

Is using non-free software not voluntary? Nobody puts a gun to your temple, and forces you to use it.

Marx believed that efficiency via technology in capitalism over time will lead to the demise of capitalism itself, now with globalism and with tech companies are competing on a global scale (an Indian company or Chinese can doe in 2 months and 100k what you do in a year with 1 million dollars), also who would pay for a closed source paid software where you can just find a better FOSS alternative with a much bigger community, competition in software is the fiercest you can ever see and efficiency only lead to less and more distributed profits

They do if you violate the reproduction laws.

Still everyone and their dog buys MS garbage. Some even use it for money laundry, so your argument fall short in practice, but yeah, MS have to contribute to linux. What a loss...

boomer companies and governments are the major consumers who feed Microsoft with most of its profits from Windows and Office. These entities are extremely inefficient, and in heartless theoretical finance terms, money can be only made in inefficiencies and anomalies

Sounds great in theory, but industry standard is still MS crap.

MS in the server software sector lost its place, over the last decade new companies have been adopting FOSS in everything, even the boomer companies have been migrating to FOSS with time

that's why Microsoft shifted its focus to becoming a cloud vendor, since it's very hard business to replicate and needs very high capital to even start, only big competitors are Amazon AWS and Google clloud

>Maybe his analysis was correct, but his proposed solutions definitely weren't
thank you Mr. obvious, most sane people already know that

>Hmm maybe you could apply this to the production of all commodities

Funny, Socialist/communist kind of people want destroy open source because believes begin libertarian fantasy and made every open source dev get in paycheck companies.

which is all stuff corporations take and use to make money. you’ve noticed that the internet has become a vapid, ad driven hellhole, right? users aren’t using free software, they’re using commercial ad driven software that is exploiting free software for profit

This only works because a finished piece of software is not affected by scarcity, which is one of the biggest limiting factors for different economic policies. Unlike nearly everything else, software—once produced—can be copied an unlimited number of times while costing virtually zero labor, money, or materials to do so. It's economies of scale taken to infinity. Until the last few decades, nothing—not books, songs, or even words or raw information itself—could be spread this freely.

What this means is that a charitable and skilled .1% (or less) of the population can supply literally the entire globe with all the software it needs. You nearly cut out the human nature limitation in economics too, because you only need a tiny group of people who have overcome just a little bit of that nature in order for this to work. In a fully communist society, you need to either have a thousand times as many selfless people, or a willingness to use violence to coerce them into working (which doesn't turn out too well).

Even if limited to the realm of software and other digital media, I doubt if Marxist communism is a particularly good fit for this. This kind of situation is completely new; nothing like it has happened in history, and I don't think any economic system designed before the internet can really account for this.

It might be that the whole field of economics itself is not suited for this, since economics tends to deal with the distribution of limited resources. In the realm of software, the only real limited resources are ideas and the developers' free time. This is still so different from anything else in the whole realm of economics that it simply might not fit.

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>Free software is voluntary
nah

You can still buy/sell software for millions of dollars if you know the right niche, user.
Not everything is webshit and programming languages where being free is required, so both you and managed to be wrong.

COPYRIGHT IS SLAVERY. PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE IS ANTI-FREEDOM.

There is NO RESPECT for LIBERTY in a STATE GRANTED MONOPOLY OF ARTIFICIAL SCARCITY.

It is by definition ANTI-FREE MARKET.

Proprietary software fans are ABSOLUTE KEKS.