I'm not just speaking from fictional experience. Years ago I thought about how to make a living in a post-scarcity economy, then debugged my ideas in real life. In 1989 I cofounded a company that wrote free software, gave the software away for free copying under the GNU General Public License, and sold live human support for it, to the small fraction of users who wanted support. What others called piracy, we called distribution! We also quipped that we made free software affordable. Every big company we cold-called to sell support to WAS ALREADY USING OUR SOFTWARE. Many of them depended deeply on it and were happy to hire us to make it do exactly what they wanted it to. We saved Sony a year in developing the PlayStation, for example. We kept Cisco products coming out ahead of competitors by making sure they didn't get slowed down by toolchain bugs. We were profitable immediately and stayed that way, since we had no money to lose: we started it with $15,000 and grew for 6 years before taking outside investment. After 10 years, Red Hat bought our company for a billion dollars' worth of stock, adopted our business model, and ran with it. They now have more than $1B in annual sales, net income of $180M, and a $14B market capitalization. To make a good living when copying inventions is cheap and easy, create inventions -- not copies. Or as Chuck D said, "Anybody can make a copy of my last album. Only I can make a copy of my NEXT album.
