Pete Brown at Exploding Comma kinda thinks that all software should cost money. I don't blame him, when so many "free" apps and services are adware, collect data and sell/share it without your consent, or simply go unmaintained or cease to work after a release or two because the developers have bills to pay it's hard to trust software that's "free as in beer", because TANSTAAFL. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
This is why I donate to the GNU project when I can spare a few bucks. Likewise the Slackware Linux project and OpenBSD.
However, I would never pay a corporation like Google or Microsoft for software. Even if Meta's board of directors ganged up on Mark Zuckerberg on the Ides of March like he was Julius Caesar, and shanked him to death, I would never pay to use Facebook, Instagram, or Threads. I'm not willing to buy software unless it's from an independent developer, a developer-owned coop, or a union shop. I want some kind of assurance that developers aren't working in a virtual sweatshop and getting paid pennies on every dollar of revenue their work makes possible.
Labor is entitled to all it creates.
I'm not sure, however, that expecting individuals to pay for software they use is a reasonable expectation. That might work for iOS users, and a lot of people using macOS, and maybe even Windows. But Linux, and BSD? Yeah, good luck with that.
Speaking of BSD, I wonder what tech, the internet, and the world in general might look like if the University of California had continued to maintain and improve upon the Berkeley Software Distribution. One might think that developing reliable software tools that work their users without spying on them or manipulating them would be something that would lend universities a better purpose than serving as glorified vocational training or providing networking to the children of the wealthy. Imagine if the Democrats had the political will to institute a second New Deal and bring back programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration.
One would think that a WPA Linux distribution would at least be of some use to the Federal government, as well as state governments, which currently depend on for-profit corporations like Microsoft and Oracle as well as consulting firms like PwC, EY, KPMG, Deloitte, Accenture, etc. — whose incentives are not necessarily aligned with the general welfare of the people of the United States — instead of bringing programmers and sysadmins into the civil service. Then again, I think the US Postal Service would make a good nationwide ISP, and that the USPS should get back into public banking by reviving the Postal Savings System. So, what the hell do I know?
Maybe useful but not necessarily commercially viable software is yet another good argument for a generous universal basic income, which we should be calling "Social Security For All". If software is going to become vital public infrastructure, then the public treasury ought to pay for it.