[upghost]

Ok hear me out. It's not particularly obvious to me why plants being easy to replicate suddenly destroyed the rare plant market. Surely they can't be easier to replicate than software. That hasn't seemed to put much of a dent in the software market.

[slowmovintarget]

Basic economics. If value is based on scarcity of a resource, and you lift the bottleneck that makes the resource scarce, the value is reduced.

In the case of software, the resource is time (you could build/host/operate that software yourself, but it takes a heck of lot more time than you're willing to spend so you trade money for the product instead), and you can't reduce the scarcity of time.

[foxyv]

This happens in software too. When open source software like GCC came out, it suddenly became much cheaper to write C code compared to when you needed a Borland Turbo C license for $150 (1990 dollars).