Let’s play devil’s advocate. Although I have really considered this position as well. As demonstrated above, among other things – software too is built upon previous knowledge. In specific, physics, chemistry, but mostly mathematics and logic.
If we are to ascribe credit, and in term financial benefits to all the contributions behind a software package – aside the libraries upon it depends. We’ll end up owing credits and money to a lot of scientists on the way that each contributed a small or larger bit. Scientists all the way to antiquity and before. Given many of them are dead, we’d have to pay their descendants what they were owed. Now, given you have no DNA analysis to calculate exactly the percentage of DNA they share with the contributor, you can generally benefit their overall area.
In other words, we owe Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Iraq, India, Turkey a lot of money/credits. Granted, along the way smaller or medium contributions from all over Europe. Whether it be copernicus, newton—to the modern age. Advances in math (some of which have been uncovered to exist in antiquity – look up Archimedes’s “the method”).
Now, we’re left with the smaller modern day contributions (in the larger scheme), which individuals, companies, universities and researchers actually contributed to the work. Don’t forget, a lot of companies pluck research from an institution, or fund it for the sole purpose of gaining control, and instead of releasing it to the public domain – hold it down. But regardless of the details of this, arbitrary modern system—you have to pay out those contributors as well—especially those ripped off by a capitalist scheme.
How much would you charge for the software—so that it would still sell? Knowing that your contribution is now a fraction of a fraction in the greater scheme? So that you may pay all the royalties to the sources you are using.
I don’t know if you can see it, or sense it—but this paradigm breaks down on its own. There’s no point maintaining it arbitrarily. It’s too bad for the little indie developer, but it’s just as hard to make it as a singer. The only answer is, diversify as the world does—and you’ll be fine. Act like you’re owed a chance to make it as you dreamed you would and the world will swallow you.
Not only you can’t track down every contributor and pay them their royalties, but often ideas originate from different sources that had access to the same information and then made similar conclusions. There are too many examples in history of near-simultaneous inventions – who invented it first? We humans like to do the FAE (fundamental attribution error) all the time. But the truth is, if the information is available to a group of individuals, more or less to the same degree. They have a high chance of following down the same path and making similar conclusions, and they do. So then who do you pay royalties to? Whoever managed to manipulate the media and get the public to think he was the “first” to come up with it?
Then there’s the other issue of information travelling horizontally as well as vertically. That means, that we’ve lost many of the direct sources of inventions or contributions. But that they’ve been picked up by other others, other teachers and communicated horizontally (in the same era/year) across a population. Good luck reversing that.
What this is building up to, is hopefully a realization that everything is collective. Our current arbitrary system is just there because someone greedy set it up, stems from a type of economy and so forth. Just because it was there when we were born, it doesn’t mean it’s the most beneficial system to follow. Or that we shouldn’t question it—or that we shouldn’t diverge and come up with something else.
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