Are you saying that the cost of software is artificially high because companies are unethical?
That doesn't really make sense: consumers value both price and ethics, and are often willing to pay a premium to companies they perceive as more ethical. If a company could come up with a product that's both cheaper and more ethical than their competitors', they'd easily win over all their competitors' customers.
It depends where you look, and what you consider to be unethical.
One example is the game Battlefield 4: Dice/EA does not release the server software, so in order to host a server, you must rent one.
This means that only those who have a private deal with the company can host servers, leaving people in places like west Africa underserved (no servers under 100-200ms), and giving those who pay to host servers unneccessary authority over players (arbitrary rules, reserved slots, etc.).
This creates an artifical market based on copyright, and allows Dice/EA to get more money by abusing their customers.
> That doesn't really make sense: consumers value both price and ethics, and are often willing to pay a premium to companies they perceive as more ethical.
Perception is not reality. One problem is that people have been trained via propaganda to respect copyright abuses like DRM.
Because there are enough people respecting these abuses, I am forced to accept the abuses as status-quo.
There are plenty of other cases where a company constrains their customers liberty in order to coerce them into paying more. It's a problem that is exasperated by blind anti-regulation policies and setting monetary increase as the ultimate goal and ethos.
That doesn't really make sense: consumers value both price and ethics, and are often willing to pay a premium to companies they perceive as more ethical. If a company could come up with a product that's both cheaper and more ethical than their competitors', they'd easily win over all their competitors' customers.