to make money from software, a company needs to build a “moat”.
No. There are other ways.
I’ve paid more for Free Software licensed software voluntarily than I ever did for proprietary software with its moats. Largely because they have no moat.
And has that made the people selling that software rich? No.
My point is that to get rich making software you need a moat. You can still make a bit of money without it, but it will be a fraction of what you can make if you can use intellectual property laws to make sure you don’t have to worry about competitors.
No. There are other ways.
I’ve paid more for Free Software licensed software voluntarily than I ever did for proprietary software with its moats. Largely because they have no moat.
And has that made the people selling that software rich? No.
My point is that to get rich making software you need a moat. You can still make a bit of money without it, but it will be a fraction of what you can make if you can use intellectual property laws to make sure you don’t have to worry about competitors.
suse, canonical, mozilla, redhat, the linux foundation, all seem rich to me.
Ok, but you’re wrong.