I wish people would also boycott all shops and supermarkets, producers of food, construction materials, energy supplies, and all the other things needed (or demanded) to sustain our family's lives since these evil entities refuse to produce and supply all there produce for free to the rest of us in the 'community'. Who cares that they couldn't pay their employees (which ultimately includes most all of us?). Yeah, but programmers are different - I suppose it means that professional programmers (those who have programming as a career, meaning those that do it for a living) should get a real job since plenty of programmers willing to do it for free. So how come not many (any?) farmers willing to produce food for free?! I'm missing something in the argument I guess. Or is it indeed that programmers just need 'Ego' praise/satisfaction... oh wow, ain't that silly(?)...Of particular interest to economists is the willingness of programmers in the free software movement to work, often producing higher-quality than commercial programmers, without financial compensation. In his 1998 article "The High-Tech Gift Economy," Richard Barbrook suggested that the then-nascent free software movement represented a return to the gift economy building on hobbyism and the absence of economic scarcity on the internet.[18] E. Gabriella Coleman has emphasized the importance of accreditation, respect, and honour within the free software community as a form of compensation for contributions to projects, over and against financial motivations.
Software being released as open source and re-usable certainly helps other developers build (and improve) future software via modification, expansion, and combination of bits and pieces or whole parts, functions, or libraries of functions (if the software is released with a license, which does not hinder of prevent such combination). That's why, personally, I like MIT license and find GPL licenses generally 'a bit, sometimes more than a bit' annoying.
But do most people in the world work for free (at the professional level)? Do you??! Nice idea, but seems a bit daft to me. Rather, I suspect programmers (even some hobbyist ones) are tending towards Android programming nowadays since most programs written for Android include pop-up adds and the like, which painful though I personally find them, do provide a means of generating some income (and users can pay to have the ads removed). The problem (aside from encouraging programmers, including the amateurs amongst us, away from Linux application programming) is that most such Android applications are not at all open source - they are closed source proprietry. That is the real pain in my opinion. As far as I see it, GPL licensing terms encourage programmers to move towards closed source proprietry. i.e. I think it is fine that professional programmers are paid for their produce (like most every other kind of product producer), but closed source hinders future developments because of its hidden nature, whereas, vice versa, the visible nature of open source helps and encourages human technological advance/development. That's the only true 'moral' reason, in terms of the betterment of human society, that open source is better in my opinion. I disagree entirely that software, in this society we live in, should not cost money for any software that proves to be useful, desired and used. It seems only reasonable to me that, aside from hobby programming software, which is basically a fun pursuit, the cost of useful/desired and used software should be proportional to the time/labour put into its production (like most every other product produced in our type of society) - so what is wrong with that argument, pray tell? Yeah, nice to dream of altruistic utopias and champion them I guess.
Microsoft products are also not open source, and that to me is the rubbish of that product, not that we have to pay to use it. There is a big difference, of course, between the concept of 'open source' and that of 'copyright' or indeed of 'intellectual property right'. If Microsoft released say Windows 10 as open source (in the sense of being able to read the code) and someone then started selling their own compile of it for personal profit, obviously such action would be a 'problem' that needs sorting out (in terms of collaborative software making and paying companies, and their employees, for their hard work).
Making everything opensource, and free to fork and distribute, is certainly a simple (simplistic!) 'solution'. And we all love 'free' things. Come to think of it, by far the majority of professional programmers (which I suspect most of us are not) must surely be working in the proprietry software world, as their day-job at least, or the majority wouldn't be able to make enough money to survive. Yeah, a few make a living out of FOSS 'support', or similar, I suppose - hardly enough such people to make it a worthwhile career however; better to get an interview with Apple, or Google, Amazon, or ... Microsoft? Come to think of it, a friend of mine that I used to work beside ended up employed by Amazon but is now employed by Google in one of their outlets in Singapore; he is very good at all things Linux too as it happens, as good or better probably than most anyone on this forum, but most of his 'wealth' came from working with Microsoft server/networking infrastructure before his later employment with these cloud infrastructure technologies of Amazon/Google.
I wouldn't mind a job with Amazon or Google (if only... dream on...). Nice to get a reasonably well paid job, no? Of course, that's not true - money... paying for things... evil concepts!
wiak