Software

Some Fundamental Differences between Hard- and Software
The following table lists some properties of software and hardware. It shows that there is a fundamental difference between a physical good an software. Traditional market mechanisms rely on supply and demand of physical objects, sinking supplies result in rising prices and vice versa. Because software does not physically exist in the material world and it can be duplicated at very low costs the supply is virtually endless. Therefore traditional market mechanisms do not apply naturally and have to be enforced by all kinds of measures (software locks, hardware locks, legal means, etc.).

Free Software licensing and Open Source development methodologies take this into account. Proprietary licenses instead build a framework that tries to compensate the above volatile properties of software.