One thing that I think is usually absent from this is the fact that most copyleft licenses are being interpreted by the industry has having a SaaS loophole[1][2

One thing that I think is usually absent from this is the fact that most copyleft licenses are being interpreted by the industry has having a SaaS loophole[1][2], which makes the economics of developing software much more attractive. On one hand you get to use all GPL'ed code for free, so your developers have to build much less things in house, whereas you also exploit the economics of rent vs sell as other commenters have explained. It's a double whammy for the software industry which would have high margins by just using a "sell" model anyway. That being said I believe the SaaS loophole plays a big part in this, a lot of code that is out there today would have to be re-written to be sold in a traditional model and still be compliant with copyleft software licenses and usually this is not mentioned in these discussions. [1] https://www.whitesourcesoftware.com/resources/blog/the-saas-loophole-in-gpl-open-source-licenses/ https://www.whitesourcesoftware.com/resources/blog/the-saas-... [2] https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/11467/can-i-use-gpl-software-to-provide-a-commercial-cloud-service https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/11467/can-i-u...