However, they are fundamentally similar to Microsoft in that they don't question a world where technology companies working from private caches of intellectual property are able to control the use of that technology for their own best profit. In the market equation, demand is equal to, and in many ways the master of, production. Yet in the world we live in, production is highly organized and efficient and commands enormous financial resources and seductive powers of persuasion, while demand is fragmented, uninformed, and powerless. While consumers can still kill a product that they have no desire for, they are nearly powerless to direct or even influence the detailed designs of those products. For software products, consumers can only choose among a given set of alternatives, which are extremely complex, dauntingly impenetrable, and generally designed more for the company's anticompetitive purposes than for the user's tasks.
Free software is the software that kills the closed, nefarious software product industry.
It is software that users can select intelligently, to do today's tasks, and which they can collaboratively build on to handle future needs. Free software is the one thing that not even Microsoft can compete with. The only real answer is that development costs must be paid for by users. The key point here is that what is paid for is not the distribution or use of the software, but its development, and that the development of free software implies that it can be used by anyone. Intermediary organizations can pool these requests, and interested parties can up the ante.