Of course, for this to work, software must be shoehorned into the mould of a physical product. Copying of software by anyone other than the producer must be made a crime. The infinite replicability inherent in software must be artificially curtailed through legislation. Only then can the model work. This is precisely what we have with commercial software today. It is important to understand that the commercial model works by imposing a system of artificial scarcity. It is physically possible and economically feasible to produce as many copies of software as the world needs, but that is however, legally punishable.

That means that many people who need software but cannot pay the asking price must go without it. That is the only possible (legal) outcome. There are people who need a software product, and the product can be replicated at little cost, yet the transaction cannot take place. From society's viewpoint, this inefficiency is the price it pays for choosing a commercial vehicle for software development.

But now, consider an alternative to the investment model. If the cost of software development can somehow be treated as an expense, and simply written off, then the software is freed from the requirement to show a return on investment. There will be no need to artificially constrain its natural replicability. The world can have as many copies of it as it needs. There will be no need for restrictive legislation. From society's point of view, what could be more efficient?

Large expenses, however, cannot readily be written off. They need to be "amortized" over a sufficiently large number of units. This is where another property of software becomes invaluable. Software can, quite practicably, be developed by hundreds/thousands of programmers. Other intellectual works such as books, music or movies, while sharing software's trait of infinite replicability, cannot be produced by a cast of thousands. Of all the works of mankind, physical and intellectual, software stands alone in its twin characteristics of infinite replicability and amortizability of effort.

Looked at this way, Open Source seems the more natural and efficient way to build software. Get a large number of interested developers to work on a piece of software. Most of them spend less than a couple of hours a day on it, so they don't mind "writing off" the effort in terms of expecting a monetary return.

That is why Open Source operating systems and associated software are free for every man, woman and child on earth to copy. By keeping important software like