If you turned the tables on your &quot;free market&quot; anecdote, what is the market value of that ER doctor or radiologist as a software developer?  I&#x27;m not even sure how to account for emotions, I&#x27;m pretty dispassionate about unit testing frameworks, but if my daughter might be crippled for life I&#x27;m fairly certain I wouldn&#x27;t be a rational market participant.  Its highly likely that your trying to practice medicine without a license holds the same market value as a doc trying to be a software dev, that being somewhere between 0 and a modest negative number.<p>You could extend the analogy by taking printouts of the pricing plans for github(tm) and visual source safe(tm) and waving them in front of the er doc to ensure the er doc makes the wisest possible free market decision when selecting a source code repository.  This is only a fair analogy if the ER doc knows absolutely nothing about software development other than if he gets the decision wrong his life will be ruined.<p>As a somewhat more neutral analogy, waving prices for github vs VSS in front of my mother quite frankly holds negative value for all participants, its a Potemkin show that merely wastes labor hours.  Pretending to provide a market where none can possibly exist is wasting labor time putting on a show.  My mom has some skill in real estate law so she should be making decisions in her area of expertise, and software professionals should be making decisions in their areas of expertise.  My mom does not walk up to random people on the street and insist they make life changing decisions in minutes about the right legal strategy to provide clear title to real estate or WTF exactly she did before she retired, &quot;well in that county a title search costs $X but title insurance and hoping for the best costs $Y unless we take it to court then it costs $Z...&quot; etc.<p>See you can &quot;make a market&quot; in a campy going-thru-the-motions sense by having a semi-monopoly provider declaring an arbitrary list of prices on a chalkboard then calling that a free market.  But making a functioning efficient market is a whole nother kettle of fish that requires a calm rational meeting of equal minds at a similar level of training and education to dispassionately trade interchangeable identical commodities, with the goal of all participants minimizing the spread between price and value.  That&#x27;s pretty much the opposite of good medical care.