Why is selling software so weird?

Because artificial scarcity is artificial.

A critical part of any non-trivial business situation is understanding what question to ask for what reason.

When deciding “should we make the incremental effort to expose an already existing dataset as a new product?” you are quite reasonably going to look at different data than if you want to know “overall, how profitable were our data products in aggregate last year?”

That’s the main point of the article we’re discussing: how things get weird when marginal costs are very close to zero.

Music is absolutely duplicable ad infinitum exactly in the same way as software. I really don't see a material difference between recording an album in a recording studio and writing a program at a desk, or writing a book for that matter. Amazon makes good money selling books digitally. In fact I could even argue that an MP3 file and an eBook or any digital content are forms of software you run on an interpreter.

As for the value in software, I used to work for a software vendor that developed planning software for cellular radio networks. It would load up effectively an image file of terrain data, with each 'pixel' representing a square of terrain giving a height, then there was a database of cell site locations, antenna heights and orientations, etc and it would generate maps of signal strength, interference, etc. Really cool stuff. A lot of the value in that software came from experience, expertise and real-world testing and validation by radio engineers.

A lot of high value software encapsulates a lot of expertise by people other than the programmers. Now I'm in finance, but the software we work with gets huge amounts of input into it's design and specifications and validation from the users and customers who put in a massive investment of time and energy and expertise to ensure the software is fit for purpose. That work absolutely adds value, without it the software couldn't exist or have any value.

The idea that software is some miraculous exception to economic reality is a mirage. Free software purists discount all of that, which is why libre software is irrelevant in so many product categories. All of that input, beyond just programming, has to be paid for somehow and the fact is commercial software is capable of rallying the investment necessary to pay for all of that and create useful products.

The libre movement also completely misunderstands the nature of rights. In principle yes the owner of a computer has the right to determine what software runs on it and how it executes, but equally we routinely give up our rights or accept restrictions on them in return for benefits all the time. When Stallman goes to work in return for being paid he gives up his right to stay at home with his family or go to a bar with his friends. He gives up the right to be intoxicated. In theory he has free speech rights to say whatever he likes, but certain forms of speech in a work place that would otherwise be protected speech will get you fired or prosecuted. Why should we not choose to give up some of our rights over our computers in the same way? Very few rights are absolute like that (not none, but very few), because we can reasonably choose to accept limits on them.

Nice to hear there are more people out there doing this :)

I'm currently developing a very specialized desktop application for a laboratory and it has been an amazing experience. Working closely together with your users means you get to prioritize what really matters and that you can clearly see the effect of your software in people's lives (in this case, at least 5x increase in productivity and a more healthy distribution of work). I especially enjoy demo time, because I see the enthusiasm in the faces of my customers. It can be tough, though, establishing your reputation at the beginning.

My first product in 1987 sold in boxes, with floppies that had to be duplicated and a manual printed, plus shipping to distributors and mail order companies. If we were lucky we got paid 180 days later assuming they were sold, otherwise we had to pay to get the unsold inventory back. A later product with a larger audience cost $10 just to send an update, and that had very little profit, since it required all the same manufacturing costs. I never did that again.