It's not totally wrong though is it. For the most part selling shrink-wrapped software is dead (compared to the 90s), because end users expect native software to be free (in both senses, although the beer sense is probably the more important). The only real exception is B2B software and games. It's why the vast majority of developers younger than about 30 are either working on internal corporate software or on SaaS web apps.
Nobody will graduate from university with a CS degree in 2015 thinking that they will sell software directly to people. Those graduates will dream of creating or working for a web service supported by ads or subscriptions. It won't be any more 'free', in fact it will probably be much worse than the shrink-wrapped proprietary software of the 90s (your data controlled by a 3rd party server, tracking for ads, no ability to stick with old versions, software stops working when the server goes down etc). But despite that it feels more morally acceptable to people to work on SaaS, and I think the way freedom is framed by the GPL is a big part of that. People who work at Facebook or AirBnB or Twitter or Google don't view themselves as evil merchants of proprietary software. They see themselves as socially aware employees of modern companies who 'get it' and support open source and free software - look how much open source code facebook and google gift to the world!
The marketing push towards open source was a mind blowing runaway success. It killed the most profitable industry ever seen in human history and replaced it with an even more profitable subscription service where a non trivial amount of the work is done for free by volunteers. This hasn't impacted developer employment because the overall industry has grown due to the huge number of SaaS companies springing up every day. It remains to be seen if that's sustainable. (There's enough profitable B2B SaaS subscriptions based companies to mean it probably is, overall, but the ad supported consumer sector is a bit scary, at least from an outside perspective).
Nobody will graduate from university with a CS degree in 2015 thinking that they will sell software directly to people. Those graduates will dream of creating or working for a web service supported by ads or subscriptions. It won't be any more 'free', in fact it will probably be much worse than the shrink-wrapped proprietary software of the 90s (your data controlled by a 3rd party server, tracking for ads, no ability to stick with old versions, software stops working when the server goes down etc). But despite that it feels more morally acceptable to people to work on SaaS, and I think the way freedom is framed by the GPL is a big part of that. People who work at Facebook or AirBnB or Twitter or Google don't view themselves as evil merchants of proprietary software. They see themselves as socially aware employees of modern companies who 'get it' and support open source and free software - look how much open source code facebook and google gift to the world!
The marketing push towards open source was a mind blowing runaway success. It killed the most profitable industry ever seen in human history and replaced it with an even more profitable subscription service where a non trivial amount of the work is done for free by volunteers. This hasn't impacted developer employment because the overall industry has grown due to the huge number of SaaS companies springing up every day. It remains to be seen if that's sustainable. (There's enough profitable B2B SaaS subscriptions based companies to mean it probably is, overall, but the ad supported consumer sector is a bit scary, at least from an outside perspective).