[olefoo]

Let's turn his analogy around and ask, if every startup and nonprofit that ever wanted to put up a website had to either buy or build a webserver, would the web as we know it exist? More to the point would the standard protocols and encodings that we mostly take for granted have evolved? Or would we all be coding for aolserver and bitching about how to get our websites approved on different cable networks?

And the stuff about the source being paid for is a red herring, only a very few licenses prohibit the sale of software (and the GPL explicitly allows it, the only restriction is that if you sell software built with GPL components you must provide the source as well as the object code).