This makes the typical logical fallacies and over-simplifications (btw easy hint to spot economist pseudoscience) you hear in a lot of the debate around compensation for open-source software, and the idea that an “ethical” software-license could solve the perceived problem is laughable at best.

The article does recognizes that software can be freely replicated and thus falls into an entirely different “market” category… in fact there is no market at all, as a freely reproducible product automatically has a value approaching zero on a market.

Also the “productive” value is hugely overstated for most software and in nearly all cases it is merely a supplement or tool to an actually valuable product such as robotics used for automation etc. And since it is merely a supplement, it can also be easily replaced and thus making these “ethical” licenses ideas void.

So IMHO there are two “values” in software development, one as being just another cog in the wheel to produce an actual product where the software is part of it, but alone has no value. The other is the act of producing software for direct consumption (in the widest sense), which is quite similar to the work of an artist.

An artist doesn’t get paid (if ever) for the resulting artwork as a physical object, but nearly always for the act of inventing & producing it. And especially in the age of easy reproducibility of artworks I think the equivalent of standalone software developer and artist is immediately clear.

So how do we as a society make sure artists are adequately paid for their efforts? Well, that is an open question but it is nothing new that only affects artisan software developers…

Imagine, for example, an open-source software license that ensured that when used by a company, the highest paid employee of that company could not earn more than 100x the lowest paid employee, or a license that ensured that half of the profits produced by the software were distributed evenly among the employees of that company. Imagine a license which dictated that profits gained from the software had to reflect price reductions for consumers

So some kind of socialism. No thanks.

This is much simpler: as users, we should be able to own the software we have (whether we bought it or not). This is non-negotiable. When you buy a car or a washing machine, you can take the whole thing apart and fix it if you want to. Software should be no different, and therefore, the intruder here is proprietary software, a privilege, a concession that is given to all of us but completely undermines the market. That is the root problem.