Turbo Pascal was priced at $50 when it was introduced, and it just kept getting better with each new version. This was back when PCs were thousands of dollars for the lower end models. The price has to cover the costs, profits for all stages of the retail chain, spread across the market size.
Consider the cost of Facebook's software, their sunk developer costs must be on the order of a Billion dollars. It's likely the same for all of the FAANGs.
It would be interesting to estimate a price for all the work that has gone into the Linux ecosystem.
Keep in mind that the Linux Foundation has an incentive to come up with a large number. Still, this is over 10 years old and suggests $1 billion for the Linux kernel and over $10 billion for all the software in a Linux distribution: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press-release/linux-foundati...
And of course Facebook et al. is building on top of a lot of that open source development.
Consider the cost of Facebook's software, their sunk developer costs must be on the order of a Billion dollars. It's likely the same for all of the FAANGs.
It would be interesting to estimate a price for all the work that has gone into the Linux ecosystem.