Every time I hear of people complaining about paying for software I wonder what people on here do for a living. Is everyone on here getting paid for developing software that’s free?

I used to when I worked outside of games. I worked on a payments backend for an etailing website. The software cost was paid for by items purchased. I don't think anyone considers buying an item at a site like target.com considers them paying for software. That software is for the businesses benefit.

I don't buy any (non gaming) software for any other purposes because most of the time the pricing model, licensing model, or lack of platform support is not right for me.

I don't want SaaS for anything because things constantly change (almost always for the worse) from under me. I don't want to have to pay a subscription to play my music, watch my videos, or take my notes.

I am. Plenty of software companies give away software for free and make money on support, hosting, network effects, ads, etc.

But also, paying for software as an enterprise vs as a personal user are very different things. I don't get proper support, bugs and feature requests never get fixed, if a regression is introduced I'm just out of luck completely, etc. There's no SLAs.

If the software is open source I can at least fix issues myself for myself. If I'm paying for software I'm also paying for new bugs, lack of support, and constantly increasing prices. Somehow by paying money I end up with lower agency.

You may find Kevin Kelly's post, "Technology wants to be free" (2007), interesting.

  ... five traits of networked technology – perfect market competition, price transparency, innovation sharing, collaboration, and expanding markets – ceaselessly push technology toward the free.

  ... There is an unarticulated assumption held by many people that the natural state of any created thing is expensive. Technology is believed to be born dear and costly, and it is only through relentless hard work that things can be made cheap. Indeed, according to this perspective, everything is naturally expensive, and would remain so, but for genius and sweat. This natural level of expense and scarcity can only be lowered by applying constant energy, favorable legislation, and technological vigilance, otherwise the price of a good may spring back up to its natural elevated level. God forbid a disaster or calamity collapses the system and allows the prices of everything to revert to their true unattainable price.

"The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money."