However, my point was just that laid off IT people are going to find it pretty tough to develop a software product for sale - because most products that most people want are either free or MS.
From your post, you clearly already have money - enough to finance a company to hire lawyers, PR, etc. Realize most laid off IT people can probably scrounge up around 20K or so to invest for all corporate expenses - and the rest is sweat equity. Meanwhile, they are living off their savings. Trying to do marketing on such a small amount is a laugh.
You are refering to "millions of dollars" back in the dot-bomb days. Heck, most folks today would just be interested in the "thousands of dollars". But unless you are already an established company, no lender wants to touch anything related to the Internet or software products even with someone elses 10 foot pole. So yeah, people really are back to the days of "build it in your garage". Whether that is a good thing depends, I think, on whether they can sell whatever they create. And that circles back to my original point. I love using OSF software - but realize that anyone trying to product software in their garage and sell it is probably doomed, because:
(a) They have no money to market it.
(b) If they do market it, people don't want to buy from them because they aren't a big company like Microsoft, or else
(c) they don't want to buy it because, heck, they can get it for free. True, the free stuff is not supported, but how much support can one guy in a garage provide?
Kind of a catch-22.