Why Software Must Be Free

Written by Dirk Jan Buter on August 05, 2026. Photo by Dirk Jan Buter.

For decades, the software industry has operated on a foundational premise: code is a scarce intellectual property that can be locked behind paywalls, licensed, and monetized. Companies built moats out of proprietary codebases, and copyright laws served as the walls protecting them. Today, that entire paradigm is collapsing. We have entered an era where clinging to traditional software economics is not only obsolete, it is actively harmful to our technological progress and our planet.

When software carries a hefty price tag or restrictive licensing terms, a strange economic friction occurs. Instead of adopting an existing, perfectly functional solution, organizations and individuals increasingly choose to build their own custom alternatives using AI. At first glance, this looks like empowerment. In reality, it is massive, wasteful redundancy. Millions of people are spinning up resource-intensive AI models to write code that has already been written, tested, and perfected elsewhere. This redundant generation squanders staggering amounts of global resources, consuming vast amounts of electrical power, draining millions of liters of cooling water for data center thermal regulation, and burning through hardware lifecycles to solve problems that were already solved years ago. When software is treated as a guarded commodity rather than a public utility, we pay for it twice: once in licensing fees or development costs, and again through the environmental toll of planetary-scale duplication.

We must confront an uncomfortable truth for traditional software vendors: AI has driven the marginal cost of writing code down to near zero. When anyone can prompt an AI to spin up a functional application, database wrapper, or utility script in seconds, the traditional monetary value of software evaporates. Code is no longer a rare, high-value asset that requires years of specialized labor to produce from scratch. It is a fluid, infinitely replicable medium. Clinging to a business model built on selling access to instructions that an AI can reproduce on demand is a losing battle. The future belongs to services, integration, and community support, not to monetizing the static text of the code itself.

Copyright law was built for the physical world of printing presses and mechanical inventions, where copying required physical factories and distribution networks. Applied to the digital realm, it has transformed into a choke point for human creativity. True innovation has always been cumulative, relying on the ability to stand on the shoulders of giants. Modern copyright laws, however, require us to pay rent for every shoulder we stand on, erecting artificial legal barriers that prevent developers from seamlessly auditing, modifying, and improving existing work. When we treat code as property rather than shared knowledge, we slow down the velocity of human progress. Innovation thrives on frictionless collaboration and iteration, and every time a brilliant idea is locked behind a restrictive license or tied up in legal compliance, society loses the compounding benefits of that collective intelligence.

The economic models of the past are colliding with a technological reality they were never designed to handle. If we want a sustainable, efficient, and rapidly evolving technological landscape, we must rethink our relationship with code. Software should be free, not just as in free speech, but as in free air. By removing paywalls and dismantling restrictive copyrights, we eliminate the incentive to waste planetary resources on redundant AI generation, honor the true deflationary nature of automated code creation, and unlock a new era of unhindered human innovation.

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