Abolish copyright.
You can charge for material things - paper, ink, packaging material, the time of the workers to prepare it. You can even charge for bandwidth, server upkeep, and electricity. But information has no material cost and therefore cannot be sold.
Exercise civil disobedience: it's your obligiation as a good citizen to be a pirate. We can negotiate again when they change the law to make copyrighted works enter the public domain within our lifetimes.
@sir Also charge for the time to compile the information and the experience it takes to transform that into an educational or entertaining source.
@portpupper @aeveltstra that works. It also keeps you honest, because if you put adware or spyware into your binaries, I'm going to patch them out of your source and offer the binaries for free
No that will not work. If people can get something for free they will, cause they are not stupid, so the only way that will work is if there is something legal(buildyright?) or physical(computing power) preventing building software. If you say yes to that it will be abused.
Warranty on binaries is the answer and that has been known. For example GPL specifically allows adding warranty for that exact purpose. People need to start taking software more seriously (like cars, home appliances or other engineering products) and prefer/demand warranty. There should be international standards and regulation in place. Low quality, obscure and buggy software should not be accepted as the norm.
I don't see the analogy. You might be a bit out of context. Do the offices offer the full range of Starbucks coffee? Do they offer it to general public in quantities that can satiate the demand? Is drinking coffee in an office that you are not invited to the accepted norm in society?
Now if Starbucks offered their full range of products and services either free or paid, that would be an analogy fitting the context here.
Whereas companies selling movies (for example) often subtract value (ads, restrictions on where you can watch the content, and so on).
My questions for access and normalization of free office coffee were to show that you have no statistical argument, in case that's what you were trying to present. I think I see what you mean now, and my point was that only added value you can offer with software is warranty. Unless it's something completely unrelated like "buy our binary and get a plush toy of our mascot", but at that point you might as well just sell the mascot, I don't see the point... and I have to admit I do want a plush baby gnu.
Also I have a little bit of a problem with the slight (unrelated) implication that people who need space for socializing are pressured into drinking specific brand of coffee by socioeconomic (I guess) norms. If you need a pleasant space you should pay for pleasant space, to people who make spaces pleasant. Not always possible in real world, due to scarcity, but should be in software - there is plenty of space for everyone, and there is no need to invent arbitrary boundaries.
I wasn't attempting a statistical argument, no. Which providers can scale and which can't isn't really very important when you have a competitive marketplace. It's bad when you have monopolies, though.