> It's a viable business model in the small, not when you're developing software for a huge market where a handful of customers can't bankroll future versions of the software.
That depends entirely on your apparent assumption that only high-overhead organizations can produce software for broad use. This is clearly not the case.
> The point is that when companies cannot sell the software directly, they need to rely on alternative monetization models.
It's lucky, then, that nobody has credibly established that copyright is necessary to be able to sell software directly -- or that things that are bad for the nominal customers are the only options for alternate revenue models.
That depends entirely on your apparent assumption that only high-overhead organizations can produce software for broad use. This is clearly not the case.
> The point is that when companies cannot sell the software directly, they need to rely on alternative monetization models.
It's lucky, then, that nobody has credibly established that copyright is necessary to be able to sell software directly -- or that things that are bad for the nominal customers are the only options for alternate revenue models.