From that point of view nothing that requires human input is free. Which is true in a sense, people are using free to mean free to use, not free to improve.
TANSTAAFL does not need a qualifier to apply. "Nothing is really free, so whatever you got 'for free' from a community member or some non-commercial effort was bound to have limited reach" is more like the point I'm trying to make.
Of course we put labor into it. It's not some seance or wormhole communicating with the software dimension.
This is the way FOSS is meant to work. I got jobs where an employer was happy to run other people's FOSS software "for free", happy for me to contribute bugs/requirements/patches back upstream, and happy to release our own projects under FOSS licenses.
It is a win-win for all involved. That's the whole point of it.
You seem to imply that work on FOSS projects is a second-class activity, meant to be done after companies and employers have secured their revenue sources.
This is like trickle-down economics for FOSS and it doesn't work.
I wouldn't call it second class. Maybe second-order?
To me, it is no different than management, planning, logistics, marketing, etc. which is done for the purpose of supporting some other objective.
It simply means that you perform software development as work-for-hire in support of that other objective, rather than for the purpose of licensing revenue. It provides wages for services rendered, just like the vast majority of other job types.
It just doesn't provide for scalable virtual rent extraction for a "publisher" or other middleman. To me, that is a benefit of it. It removes a bunch of perverse incentives from the table. Incentives that tend to harm the developers and users for the benefit of those middlemen.
In principle, I don't disagree. The problem is that in practice the large corporations managed to neutralize any chance for independent by commoditizing the software service layers that supported their business and invest all their resources they could to package their proprietary solutions on top of it, AWS and "OpenElastic" being the textbook example for it.
The one way to get out of this mess would be to have the market paying a premium for companies that do R&D in FOSS directly. It can not be a secondary goal, and we can not be telling them they shuold find some other way to make a living.
TANSTAAFL does not need a qualifier to apply. "Nothing is really free, so whatever you got 'for free' from a community member or some non-commercial effort was bound to have limited reach" is more like the point I'm trying to make.