The Care and Feeding of FOSS: The Lifecycle of Software Technology: "Did you ever sign a license agreement that banned you from reverse-engineering your car? No. It's the difference between information and bricks: Information costs essentially zero to copy, but every brick costs the same as the last one. Once a manufacturer designs a new car, they have to invest a billion dollars or so building a REALLY big factory to manufacture them. By contrast, once you design your software, you (or anybody else) can manufacture it for virtually nothing. This is true of all products that consist of information rather than things: books, movies, music, encyclopedias, stock predictions and newspapers, and is the foundation of the current crisis of rampant information theft on the internet. This is the critical difference between 'traditional' businesses and software: Software costs virtually nothing to manufacture. It is hard to emphasize this point enough, for it is the key to the last two stages of the software lifecycle, and the key to understanding the business itself."