This is very simple to understand: in the long run, price tends to marginal cost of production. Open source represents the logical endpoint: since marginal cost of software is ~0, the endpoint is something with price ~0. SaaS is a response, but open source is already chipping away at the low end.
As for the general thought about experts, consider web browsers. Advancing the state of the art is extremely expensive, yet the browser vendors are more or less forced to give it away for free. The browsers that either charged money or weren't open source ... for the most part died out.
> in the long run, price tends to marginal cost of production
Ah but this principle applies to commodity markets, where prices rising above the marginal level would prompt an increase in production from competitors or new entrants to the market.
Software is not a commodity though, nobody other than Adobe makes Photoshop, we can’t increase production of Photoshop. People can create competing products, of course, but that’s just a regular competitive market. This is also why movies and ebooks don’t cost $0.
> browser vendors are more or less forced to give it away for free
Yes but that’s not because of the market, the idea of giving it away free was to distort the market. It was done to crush Netscape and it worked. Now it’s done to grab as many eyeballs as possible and keep competitors off your turf. I think it’s possible that we’ll return to paid web browsers when the interests of the vendors and the users are more closely aligned - in a sense Safari and Edge are already there, as they’re both priced-in to their respective OS’s.
> the idea of giving it away free was to distort the market. It was done to crush Netscape
Oh this is interesting:
> [Netscape Navigator] Version 3.0 was also available in a "Gold" version which featured a WYSIWYG HTML editor (later added to Netscape Communicator as a standard feature), and was sold as retail software for profit.
It would have been interesting to see how things would have turned out had Microsoft been able to continue integrating the OS and web browser.
At this point I expect most users expect the OS to include a web browser and would consider it deficient otherwise. I'm not sure if it's even possible to replace Chrome with Firefox on ChromeOS.
You can install Firefox on ChromeOS. (At least I've done it on ChromeOS Flex.) However, just like Windows 98 used Internet Explorer for some of its internals (eg the 'live' Desktop), so does ChromeOS use Chrome for eg tweaking the settings.
As for the general thought about experts, consider web browsers. Advancing the state of the art is extremely expensive, yet the browser vendors are more or less forced to give it away for free. The browsers that either charged money or weren't open source ... for the most part died out.