> If all you do is compose parts that already exist, then anyone can do it and your value add is almost nothing.
Looks like you believe to Marx theories, that anybody could JUST make value. I mean, on such markets, you really could start sells from zero or with very limited resources.
But this is true only for very early stages of market, when competition does not matter.
- On developed markets, competition is very significant, so to make moderate success, you have to use external resources - grants, credits, crowdfunding, etc.
What Marx don't said, that people divided to two big groups - passionaries (mostly entrepreneurs), and ordinary humans.
They different in very important thing - passionaries have from nature need to change world (ordinary does not have such need at all), and on some moment of passionary life, earlier better, he switches to famous circle:
1. accumulate resources.
2. invest resources to some project to change environment.
3. when project on 2 approaches to some endpoint, have strong signs of success or failure, return to 1.
Ordinary people just satisfy their needs of mostly lowest levels of Maslow pyramid, they don't accumulate resources, they don't try to invest, and so they have not any success in projects, even when I agree, that many projects need very little resources to start profitable business.
Only exception, when ordinary human face some very easy to enter and extremely profitable opportunity, which does not include any risks or responsibility, than greed could defeat laziness.
But such things don't happen frequently.
As I said before, most real opportunities include risks, include need to build circle of trust (so people will give their resources for free), or just get somewhere resources with conditions, like credits from financial entities.
So, return to our technical things, you are right, that exist totally free things, which could use anybody, but in most cases, they are not enough to make value, in many cases they are useless or they used to create barrier to enter this business.
I even must accent, I've been involved in few opensource projects, and in near all successful projects, their lead constantly made decisions, which features will not include in free version, to motivate people pay for them.
Most known example of free project, created as barrier - Eclipse IDE, which destroyed really big markets where lived lot of businesses - Borland, Watcom, Tiny C, etc, and when appear Eclipse, they become unprofitable.
So, life is struggle, but I repeat - technically you are absoultely right, in that near anything possible, if somebody else pay for it :)