[sten]

broken analogy is broken

for your analogy to match, you would have to mow all the lawns for free for anyone that asked.

go ahead and have your lawn mowing company compete against the ‘free lawn mowing movement’. your company would go out of business.

[JustSayNoToNannies]

go ahead and have your lawn mowing company compete against the ‘free lawn mowing movement’. your company would go out of business.

So the ‘free lawn mowing movement’ would be "anti-capitalist" and something for conservatives to oppose?

[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

A lot of so-called “free” (Or Open Source if you prefer) software is written by paid employees at for profit companies. The model is a bit more complex than it may first appear. There are a million examples of how this works - but an easy one might be an open source driver for a piece of proprietary hardware. Or maybe an open source VPN client to connect to a proprietary VPN aggregator. And there are even more complicated scenarios than just that. Such as “giving away” the software but getting paid to configure it i.e. “advanced services”.

All is not as it first appears.

[Notary Sojac]

Yep, if if a group of Americans volunteered to mow each other's lawns, the people who mow lawns for a living would have to find a different line of work unless they could do a sufficiently more meticulous job that homeowners felt it was worth the money.

I personally use bought-and paid-for-software when it's well written, well supported (can't emphasize that enough) and meets a specialized need that the open source market can't.

But pay for a bog-standard email client that's no better than Thunderbird, or MS Excel when LibreOffice meets every need I have? Not a chance.