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In the early days of computers software was looked upon as an add-on the hardware. A company spent a few 1950's millions or a few 1960's thousands to acquire a room's worth of computing equipment and thrown in was the software necessary to drive it. During that era most of the organisation's specific software needs were developed in-house.

Bill Gate, founder of Microsoft, is one of the people who actively strove to make software a commodity users paid for. Given the success of the company it is clear that he has been successful in making this happen. One method software-vendors adopt is that of providing heavily discounted software to students, large clients and emerging markets. Another approach is to striking deals with corporate clients in which their employees could either have a copy of the software on their home computer for free or for a discounted price. This addresses the issue of employees pirating software off their employers. Making it more difficult to pirate software by building in mechanisms into the software has had considerable success although legitimate users complain that they have to carry the cost and inconvenience these extra mechanisms bring about. An education campaign highlighting the fact that it is wrong to pirate software and that pirating software is equivalent to stealing is effective with many users. In 1988 Microsoft and other companies set up the Business Software Alliance (BSA) with the intent to fight piracy. This organisation has a legal and investigative team 100 person strong and prosecutes thousands of cases each year.

On the other side of the coin are those who advocate that software should be free to use. The reasoning for this is that society as well as the people who write the software stands to benefit from this model. They also purport that it is computer users' rights to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs and that any action to inhibit this goes against the interest of society. For example, these folk believe that placing patents on software will stifle innovation and competition and will technically destroy the small programming shops and hobbyist programmers who, because of huge legal costs, will end up at the mercy of large companies who have the financial and legal resources to acquire large numbers of patents and ward off small timers. They claim that patents will prevent programmers from independently inventing the same solution to a problem, something which is done regularly

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