[orangecat]

The existence of a reasonable 'free' product may also deter the entrance of multiple competitors who would have advanced the state of the art. Clearly this is bad for society.

That's not clear at all. If you can't beat a "good enough" free alternative in the market, that's a signal that society would benefit more if you spent your efforts elsewhere.

I'm arguing against the dogma that free software is always automatically good.

As a first approximation, it pretty much is. Would you care to name specific free software that we'd be better off without?

[danssig]

Gimp. If that didn't exist for free maybe someone would have created a product by now that actually competes with photoshop. Of course I can't prove this, but I'll offer the app store as supporting evidence. Look at all the photo editing software that sprang up as soon there was a place Gimp couldn't get to.