It's wild that "people should pay for software" is a controversial statement amongst software developers.

If software developer, don't pay for the software you rely on. Then non technical users who appreciate software even less would pay for software with much less frequency and for much lower prices when they do!

It is us as developers that need to first institutionalize the idea that software is paid, otherwise we have little hope to get paid for our efforts.

There is difference between paying for software and paying for the development of software, you know.

Yeah sure, but there's trickle down effects. What incentive would an employer have to hire you to build software, if they can't then go and sell the software that you built for profit.

My employer themself uses the software I write for them plus they provide access to its functionality as a service. This model have been bringing in enough profit for the last 10 years, apparently, to justify the steady expansion of the number of programmers employed.

Ah yes, the phenomenon I was describing does apply more strongly to consumer software. But it also does apply to B2B software to a lesser degree.

In effect the fact that your business model relies on charging for bespoke software, proves that you make no money on software that can be reused for more than one client! Which is actually where most of the efficiency of software comes.

Even if you want your software to be used by the public, it still doesn't need to be turned into a product, there are other schemes of financing it. You can, for instance, write it off as R&D (which is what programming actually is) or whatever category is assigned to the "donating to Linux Foundation" line in the spending accounts of IBM/Oracle/MS/etc.