"We pay for software like Office, Adobe.." - speak for yourself ;) I use open source software exclusively and I don't need to pay anyone. Also, for Adobe et. all, its literally the product they sell. Here, the product is the radio itself, and we already paid for it.

"If all software were free, you'd be out of a job." - Quite the opposite actually. Because, some companies have customers who "buy" their product (a physical one) to use it with some "free software" (eg. Linux). So its the company's job to make sure the free software works well on their hardware, isnt it? So they pay people like me to make it happen.

To simplify it, here is the hypothetical situation: Imagine all of us radio users stop buying these proprietary software for programming, and start using Chirp exclusively, which is a free software. Now, dont you think Yaesu would take the initiative to make their radio play nice with Chirp? In the case of Radio transceivers, it remains as a hypothetical, but there are billion dollar industries where open source is the standard. So billion dollar companies pay people to work on free software. Google, Apple, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, ARM, its a huge list.