engineer on Nostr: Probably necessary? Without them the money in software ends up with the hardware ...

Probably necessary? Without them the money in software ends up with the hardware renters, who are the biggest
concentration of power. AWS, Google, Azure etc. They can run all
this public domain software and sell it. No one else can make a dime. You are now into trade secrets as your only protection i.e. keeping code hidden on a web server.