>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.
You don't write an album on the computer (unless you're a DJ, which is, one would argue, not real music). My point was that things on a computer all exists in a realm where you can "right-click > copy" things. Like, that's it.
Still the initial point of building things in the real world, that you can see and touch, stand.
From the OP:
>Software is a great business because, if you can build something that’s useful and provides $10/month of value to someone, it’ll probably cost you a lot less than $10/month to provide that value to a second person. Multiply that by 1,000 and you’re getting paid to do a full time job, even if you only work 5 hours per week. Multiply that by 10,000 and you can retire in a few years. It’s an extremely high leverage business.
>This makes software a weird anomaly.
Yes, software is a weird anomaly, because everything is scalable, because you can right-click copy. Software is a miraculous exception to reality because internet and the computer space is, frankly, some miraculous exception to reality.
Though I may be biased you know, I work in architecture and the software is absolutely horrendous. The added layers of complexity just brings endless frustration -- although in more theoretical fields (like finance) it may work much better, I see your point.
Now I don't see highly-specialized software having a hard time being sold to customers. Most definitely these things sell like crazy, and make their owners ostentatiously rich, which is not the case of the OP. But maybe he should have talked about centralization and monopolies, a logical consequence of scalability, which is what happens when everything is constantly connected as it is on the internet -- because, again, the computer space is a weird space -- and how it makes it much more difficult for small players to gain traction.
I use Blender whenever I can -- it is a fantastic software, capable of doing many things, and it's held up by a global foundation where all the actors of the industry play their part. I'm not saying it's the ideal business model, but it sure is the only software client I respect.
Going to work is not really "giving up rights" as much as it is not having the choice. On the computer space, you have the choice, all the time, that's why it's contradictory.
Maybe we need to create a completely locked-down computing environment, maybe that's the solution.