[foolmeonce]

I think the OP is right about the economic effect. Companies selling their most powerful machine with limiters you must pay to remove dropped the overall benefits of computers to society, but society paid those companies more money for less total benefit as a result of users with higher need for it having to pay more than users with barely a need.

Similarly in software, you can't buy an OS on a per system basis for anywhere near the portion of its cost to produce and keep competitive. The large number of jobs customizing free software exist but they would also exist in a world where there were many competitive profitable stacks bellow them, and they would be buying or creating more expensive middleware instead of expecting anything not specific to their niche to come for free in the next OS release.