zdnet.co.uk: Equilibrium price of proprietary software is nothing

[Alex Hudson]

Ben Finney wrote:
> The article makes the familiar argument that in a healthy market any
> goods will tend to be priced very close to their marginal production
> cost, and the marginal cost of producing a new copy of an existing
> program is effectively zero; this is acknowledged by free software
> vendors, and not by proprietary software vendors.

That's not true; plenty of proprietary software vendors give their 
software away at no charge, and some (and not enough imho) free software 
vendors charge for theirs.

I have a deep scepticism for arguments which say all software should be 
given away at no charge. The fixed costs of development are such that 
the "trend toward zero" is never actually reached for any but the most 
popular of software.

Cheers,

Alex.