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This was a piece I had rattling around in my head for some time. It gets weak at the end, and has no real flow to it, but it's interesting enough in places that I thought I'd clean it up and publish it. Enjoy my dark sarcasm!
In a mass-market scenario, the larger the population the higher the chance for one or more free software projects to appear.
Since software can, in theory, be inherited by additional programmers and indefinitely updated, even the smallest chance for a free software project to be created becomes an inevitability over time. This means that even a niche market scenario can have competition from free software.
A crowd of hobbyists will have more time and expertise for a general-purpose piece of software than a development house can bring to bear. Simply put, they can do it better.
It goes without saying that cheaper, better and more supported free software will eventually out-compete proprietary equivalents, displacing established businesses and markets.
How can this problem be addressed?
