A range of prices for software development effort and its products will always exist, because that effort is governed by the same economic principles that influence all systems. Regardless of how the payment is arranged in time, which elements of the work are notionally free, which administrative artefacts it is associated with, or who can be convinced to pay, some level of compensation needs to be obtained. The less the compensation, the fewer the people who will be interested in doing software development and the less talented they will be.
Software users will always take the cheapest option that gets them the products and services they need or want, but there is a range of needs and wants. That product and service variation enables differential pricing to exist. Completely free and relatively good useful software will continue to be rare, because if it becomes relatively good and useful enough, people will pay for it and few people who can take payment will refuse it.
As the software development industry matures, the range of software products and services will broaden to meet all needs and wants. However, as in other industries, standardisation, simplification and specialisation will enable use of lower cost workers. This will typically involve lower labour cost economies doing more of the work, with value added services applied in the higher labour cost economies. Hence the future of the software development industry in higher labour cost economies will tend toward value added management and consultancy based roles and work that requires tighter integration into complex and/or specialist systems, especially those with culturally specific elements.
Everyone has the right to try to make a living out of their work, including the people at MySQL. They have stopped access to the convenient source download bundle for their enterprise server product except for paying customers. Although it is still possible to get the source for free in a less convenient form and build it, the move is clearly designed to discourage free build and usage. The next logical step for them is to decide that licensing revenue for the enterprise server is being lost to others building their code and so make that code available only to paying customers.
MySQL started out with a free open-source product. Later it added a commercial license fee for owners of systems using MySQL that don’t provide their source, encouraging the open source model but also generating licensing revenue. Their enterprise server product is also licensed. MySQL have a balance of licensing and service revenue; they have evolved to produce “affordable database servers and tools” not free software. I think this serves to endorse the point I am trying to make about free software.
Gary E Byatt