The cost of software has always been trivial, relative to the value it delivers.
The real driving factor is support, and open source tends to be very extractive when it comes to support, leading to burn-out and dead projects.
The reason Intuit and others can maintain a monopoly on the particular software they've created (and not lose it to LLM generated or open source clones) is that they have support that won't disappear on a whim, probably.
Comments
The cost of software has always been trivial, relative to the value it delivers.
The real driving factor is support, and open source tends to be very extractive when it comes to support, leading to burn-out and dead projects.
The reason Intuit and others can maintain a monopoly on the particular software they've created (and not lose it to LLM generated or open source clones) is that they have support that won't disappear on a whim, probably.