And yet the company can afford to spend an extra $0.10 per sale on marketing, which quickly drives the free option to the fringes because marketing drives almost all purchasing decisions.

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nostrademons 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Sad but true. Many libertarian options are comfortable being on the fringes, though, and just build for other libertarians. They lack economies of scale, but software's natural economies of scale (zero cost of reproduction, combined with diminishing returns to complexity) can often make this economical anyway as long as your audience doesn't mind not having the absolute highest level of UX polish possible.

	▲	inigyou 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And then when a libertarian option finds itself getting mainstream, it quickly gets co-opted by authoritarian market forces, because they are so powerful. See how Git got coopted by GitHub, and half the stuff AWS does.