software has zero marginal cost, so therefore, if a piece of software can be used by the majority of humans, it makes sense that it ends up costing very little per instance of it.
It's not a tragedy. It's actually a good outcome imho.
Software has zero marginal cost, that software engineers can imagine.
My workstation runs all the time and I don't care that it consumes this 100$ of electricity a month. Who cares about amortisation of new hardware? New, shiny is new, shiny. There are some large, expensive server machines running my software? I don't see the bill, so the costs don't apply to me.
There are dozens of engineering hours required to even partially understand how the final product should look like. But an already well fed software engineer doesn't think that every minute of his life is precious and it costs way beyond the price of his dinner cheeseburger.
Such is the fallacy of "Software engineering is free"
> My workstation runs all the time and I don't care that it consumes this 100$ of electricity a month.
That has nothing to do with zero marginal cost. The term specifically refers to the cost of producing a new copy of the software, which is so low as to be effectively zero. Almost 100% of the costs of software engineering are what would be called “fixed costs” in economics.
This is to differentiate it from the production of, say, a car, where the marginal cost of building a new Ford Focus is a significant portion of the price.
> But an already well fed software engineer doesn't think that every minute of his life is precious and it costs way beyond the price of his dinner cheeseburger.
For some developers, if they were not developing open source software for free in their spare time, they would be doing something like playing games or watching movies. At least, when they use their time to create software, they can feel like they're doing something good for other people while improving their own skills - which can translate in better jobs and hence more money though I think most would do it even if that were false.
The tragedy is that building such software should be actually very easy and incentivized, since it brings so much benefit to society. But it's not incentivized, often not easily economically viable because of the way the economic system works.
It's not a tragedy. It's actually a good outcome imho.