<< But if you could get a hard drive for $10, it wouldn't have much in the way of value. It wouldn't be "free". But if a hard drive only cost $10 I wouldn't have much problem giving them away. >>
If a million people came to you asking for $10 hard drives, and if you all gave them $10 hard drives, you would go bankrupt.
There is no way around this. Physical objects always have some nonzero base cost. You cannot scale up a free giveaway simply because, beyond some grand scale, that nonzero cost multiplied by a large coefficient surpasses all your financial resources.
When there is an exchange of physical object, there must also be an exchange of money. There simply is no way around that.
On the other hand, up till now many, many millions of people have downloaded Linux and have not paid a single cent to Linus Torvalds, its creator and now elder statesman, so to speak. But Linus has not gone bankrupt, because it doesn't cost him anything to make his ideas and algorithms and software available to others. He earns money doing his day job, and he codes Linux in his spare time, and he enjoys doing this, and he enjoys giving away the fruits of his labor. In today's networked world, the fruits of his labor can be given away on an unlimited scale, provided that enough people want it. (And do they ever!) This is simply not possible with physical objects, where each additional unit has some base nonzero cost that cannot be eliminated.
In conclusion, physical objects can only be used by one person and one person only at some given point in time. Therefore, there is a real scarcity associated with them that justifies the exchange of some nonzero amount of money. On the other hand, software can be used by an unbounded number of people at some given point in time. In today's networked society, it costs asymptotically nothing to get software from one person to another. Therefore, there is an artificial scarcity associated with software that must be eliminated. GNU GPL software eliminates this artificial scarcity by exposing it as the sham that it truly is. It provides people with high quality, functional, free (speech and beer) software.
Now, I might have to revise this piece if and when nanotech matter cloning devices are intended, and scarcity of physical objects becomes a nonissue. But until then, this is my story, and I'm sticking to it.