IP does distort the software market, and does make it very tough to enter more mature markets. The big players in a given market already hold massive patent portfolios, and create a patent thicket which makes it very hard for newer entrants.
This is a problem in any sector with IP, not just software.
No, not necessarily. In some cases where the free is almost as good as the expensive closed, then yes, I would argue this is somewhat the case (LibreOffice/Microsoft Office, GIMP/Photoshop).
Open source software is mostly done in people’s spare time, for fun, for research… If there is a paid team of software engineers to keep improving/expanding the software, the teams in open source software do tend to be much smaller. They are usually very limited in monies, and do not have much manpower, so they have to prioritize areas to improve much more narrowly (graphics is an area which usually does not get much love).
For example, in an open source program, it may be possible to add CUDA to speed up the speed of the program by a factor of X, but no one is willing, or has the expertise of this specific program/algorithm, to implement it and test it.
Closed source and for profit software brings a very large incentive towards making the product better, squashing any bugs (you will lose customers/money), and keeping certain sections of code up to date.
A quick example that pops into my head is the open source/closed source of Video Editing software. For high end video editing, closed source programs are blowing open source out of the water.
In photo editing, compare Photoshop compared to GIMP. Photoshop has many advantages for a professional editor, and they are constantly innovating and pushing the envelope (because they have lots of resources to put behind improving and implementing new ideas).
You then usually see closed source programs pushing the envelope, while open source software tries to follow in the wake by trying to emulate the new functionality.
Sure there is, but I do dislike the trend of the past many years to this crap “1080p” monitors. Hopefully the trend starts going back towards having actual resolution increases. I believe the push into higher resolution tablets will begin the push back into higher resolution monitors.
Not necessarily. There is nothing holding you back from getting a custom monitor built, it would just be very expensive to fabricate all the different parts for a very limited market. The companies tend towards coming up with uniform standards/parts, which can then be used over a wide assortment of different products, and allow interchangability of parts between different companies.
You should read about Path Dependance. Here is a few articles by Timothy Terrell:
https://mises.org/daily/329/Path-Dependence-and-Antitrust
https://mises.org/freemarket_detail.aspx?control=271
Here was a topic on the forums about QWERTY vs DVORAK:
https://forum.freecapitalists.org/t/dvorak-vs-qwerty/671
I believe he also gave a few talks on the subject at some of the Mises conferences (maybe Mises University?).