PHP6 has gone full "kitchen sink" approach, adding every feature they could think of. PHP selected a very interesting business model: you give away the program, but sell the debugger, and Zend systems has existed for a long time by trading free inclusion of a very powerful language into the Apache web server, while serving the market for professional programmers who are tired of doing "print" statement debugging. In much of the open source world this kind of bargain exists in different ways. It does give people a lot of free stuff, and then a much smaller group, perhaps 0.001% support the product. Red Hat does similar things, but i suspect does a lot better than PHP in terms of percentage of people paying. Red hat has the free Centos community version, then a paid one. As someone who made software for people in the audio/video/print publishing industries, my customers all lived and died by protection of copyright, and at different times in history their earnings were impacted mightily by piracy. Just because it has no physical cost to copy, doesn't mean it should be copied massively, and one of the reasons American/UK music dominates the world is our pretty good protection, but Napster, and the massive introduction of Asian pirated music CD's destroyed the CD industry. Not many people know that the CD wholesaling business was destroyed in america due to Asian product blending into the stream to such a degree that it basically ruined CDs. I think that Apple is among the few people left who care about protecting IP of software, and look at how much creativity they unleashed when piracy is kept to a minimum. I know that my opinion is in the small minority, but i would like to see people pay for software one time like they used to, instead of all these damn subscriptions. I don't want to subscribe to 100 things. That really bugs me, but if piracy is not controlled it is the only survivable business model.

People often pay for licensed content, even if free pirated content is available. Than happens when licensed content is very convenient to consume and price is perceived as fair and affordable. So it seems that producing good content is not enough in this new age. I think that is not that terrible, if we keep in mind that today number of customers is much higher than it was before.

I hate to be the cold splash of reality, but some people don't pay for content. Over the last 15 years, sales of my labeling software to China exactly equal the sales to the tiny country of New Caledonia. I defy you to locate New Caledonia on a world map. Honesty is not evenly distributed. That is a per capita sales ratio of around 5000:1. So i think that China could stand some improvement in terms of their attitude towards paying for intellectual property.

Well, there must be reasons why some people don't pay for content. Things do evolve over time, people get richer, attitudes change. In Russia in 90s pretty much nobody paid for software. Today many (maybe even majority) people do it. People just got richer, hence change in the attitude.

I do not want to have to try to sell developer tools - I never wanted to be a businessman, most people aren't willing to pay anyhow, and I want low-income third-worlders to have just as much access to my software as first-worlders. Therefore I do not see the problem as piracy, I see the problem as being that we're using an economic system designed for a world of scarcity (capitalism) in a world of abundance (software). That system is usually just plain wrong for the software context (except in cases where abundance doesn't really exist, like control systems for expensive hardware.) We have a solution in place for science - everyone knows that there's no commercial application for much of scientific research, but we fund it anyway because it may pay off in the future, and because understanding our world has value in and of itself. I think this should be extended beyond basic research into other areas of intellectual production, especially areas that are underfunded because the products are difficult to sell directly. This applies especially to foundational or "infrastructure" software, such as developer tools and other open-source libraries.