Writing free software is a politically radical act: while software has low reproduction cost, both the use value and the initial labor value of good software is high, so putting it into the public domain is a kind of perpetual jubilee (those who use it do not owe the author anything in exchange for its use-value) and a potlatch in the sense that the labor is exchanged for nothing at all. Copyleft licenses are even more radical: all derived software remains free from the normal mechanisms that drive labor into a state of transactionality. Although one can sell free software, the cost of reproduction is so low (and the legal mechanisms for preventing reproduction so hamstrung by the license itself) that it makes more sense to treat paying for free software as a gift-in-kind, rather than an exchange.

The idea of “open source” changed this.

For twenty years, we’ve been making corporations rich by buying into standardization and scale — making it feasible for them to funnel us into silos. We can stop this process, and perhaps even reverse it, by refusing to make un-frivolous software. Personal software should be personal: it should not scale or conform; it should chafe at strictures the same way you do, and burst out of any box that dare enclose it.

https://medium.com/@enkiv2/free-software-and-the-revolt-against-transactiona... È brillante: Frivolous Free Software contro il conformismo del serissimo open source aziendale! :-D Giacomo