Other people have answered the question more generally, but I wanted to make one particular note.
Why doesn't water have high profit margins?
Because competition drives down prices, and the developed world has done a lot to encourage such competition.
For software to be abundant-like-water, it would have to be much easier to make a competing software product. Not a copy of the product--an alternative. If the developer decided not to sell, how hard would it be to replace it?
This is why the phrase "open-source software" is generally preceded with "free."
Why don't more people use OSS is a question I always have.
I think as a programmer, I overestimate how easy it is for most people to find and configure the OSS that solves their problem.
The best OSS solutions also often lag behind the best paid solutions, so OSS applications often lose large chunks of value relative to paid solutions once you scale them, thus meriting paying more money for more cutting edge systems.
So we end up with-
People that don't need to scale don't use OSS because they don't have the scale to overcome the barriers to entry such as finding what they need and setting it up.
Orgs that do need to scale use OSS... indirectly, in their software's dependencies lists, but still have people they're paying to keep their systems cutting edge and finetuned to their specific needs.
My employer has a giant spreadsheet of different OSS licenses, because that affects what you can deliver. In a contract-focused field the inherited licenses are no good.
Alternative tools (libreOffice, OSS compilers or git clients, etc.) are at the mercy of your IT. Letting everyone download and run whatever they want is a non-starter. So there has to be a whitelist, or at least an approval process. And the bigger the company, the more tedious this gets. At a certain point corporate wants the assurance that there’s someone to contact/sue if the software turns out to be an exploit.
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Notes -
Other people have answered the question more generally, but I wanted to make one particular note.
Because competition drives down prices, and the developed world has done a lot to encourage such competition.
For software to be abundant-like-water, it would have to be much easier to make a competing software product. Not a copy of the product--an alternative. If the developer decided not to sell, how hard would it be to replace it?
This is why the phrase "open-source software" is generally preceded with "free."
Why don't more people use OSS is a question I always have.
I think as a programmer, I overestimate how easy it is for most people to find and configure the OSS that solves their problem.
The best OSS solutions also often lag behind the best paid solutions, so OSS applications often lose large chunks of value relative to paid solutions once you scale them, thus meriting paying more money for more cutting edge systems.
So we end up with-
People that don't need to scale don't use OSS because they don't have the scale to overcome the barriers to entry such as finding what they need and setting it up.
Orgs that do need to scale use OSS... indirectly, in their software's dependencies lists, but still have people they're paying to keep their systems cutting edge and finetuned to their specific needs.
It’s also very field-dependent.
My employer has a giant spreadsheet of different OSS licenses, because that affects what you can deliver. In a contract-focused field the inherited licenses are no good.
Alternative tools (libreOffice, OSS compilers or git clients, etc.) are at the mercy of your IT. Letting everyone download and run whatever they want is a non-starter. So there has to be a whitelist, or at least an approval process. And the bigger the company, the more tedious this gets. At a certain point corporate wants the assurance that there’s someone to contact/sue if the software turns out to be an exploit.
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