Software production and availability has increased greatly since the advent of the Web – anyone in the industry can see it. Why? What is the significant feature here? It is the range and scale of software that is free/libre and open-source.
But what about the rise of ‘app’ markets, is that not where the action is? No. Because that is not software. It is vitiated software.
Non-free/libre/open-source software is not really software: it is software made to be less like information, and instead it is trying to be like a limited, rigid, material object.
Software that really is software is about being copied, and changed, and reused, and remade – something communicated and mutated by the network. That is what information means.
This is the real distinction: free-software / open-source web-integrated software is living software, closed-source restricted productised ‘app-store’ software is dead software.