Ben Francis ben@franci5.fsnet.co.uk wrote: [...]
However, the harsh reality is that programmers need money to put bread on the table and apparently some geeks even have families to support! Just say someone were to program full time and released all of their code under the GPL, where does their bread actually come from? [...]
Nothing even compels you to release all GPL'd code for free to everyone every time at the same time, even though some people seem to think that.
You could get a free market in software development, which can't easily happen with the "lots of little monopolies" proprietary model. Your questions might be restated as "how does anyone make money in a free marketplace?" and there are lots of books on that. One thing that free software does is take away the ability of the producer to hold the user over a barrel and demand more money to continue using the same software. There are other benefits, but I don't think anything violates that basic idea.
You can argue that software is different because it's infinitely copiable at a near-zero per-copy cost, but so are some other things: can you see how we fit into a larger shake-up? After all this time of being told that computing is a science, or an engineering discipline, it's closer to being something like performance mathematics, with all the questions of how to make money from performing an art.
If you want to discuss this further, you might find more viewpoints on the fsfe-uk list (linked from www.affs.org.uk -> Membership -> discuss or similar) or the Oekonux project list (via www.oekonux.org I think).