You can all bow to me, as I can grow hop and brew BEER! This is probably the only sure thing about a post-apocalyptic world: people will still want to get wasted to forget

Okay, english is my second language so I'll hope people will be able to follow. It will never be a race to "zero". Everything in life has a price, either in work time or in money. Yet, if we talk about a software company as a business model (selling software), then YES your software will eventually sell for "nothing". What you will sell is more on the consultant business model than the old factoring model. Instead of selling a software, you will sell the knowledge to develop a software. No matter what happens, you can be sure that the companies won't leave their business running alone. Let's imagine a word without any OS running. Well, you can be sure that a company will go "hey! I need that piece of metal to be usefull". They'll do a simple analysis: what is the more cost effective between paying people to do the old paperwork or paying someone to develop an OS. The answer is: paying someone to do the paperwork for short term. Yet, let's say you're a BIG company and that you know that company B is in the same situation, as is company C,D and E. Well if you all group together and pay company F to develop a software, the total price will be lower. You split the prices with other company and you create an OS. Then again, you always want to lower your prices to make more money. What you do? You go see company I, J and K to help fund the development. But company B,C,D and E also did the same, so know you're about 30 paying for the development. Cost gets lower, company F makes the same amount of money and the development goes on. That's where a "perfect" OSS model would tend to. Now, will that happens? The answer is simple: IBM is behind linux Sun is going with open Solaris Novell is behind linux IBM, Sun, Novell... aren't they the "old school" computer companies? It's not generalized yet, cause we need a really important player for that to happens: MS. But they know it too much: their model is dead, they're only trying to buy time (OOXML) before it is too late, which is EXACTLY what I would've done, as everyone of us ;)