> if something like this is released as open source, the author will make a grand total of jack shit off of it because people will just grab the source and walk

> if something like this is released as open source, the author will make a grand total of jack shit off of it because people will just grab the source and walk away without any kind of compensation to the author I don't see how this is anything but unfortunate (okay, it's also untrue [krita, RedHat], but bear with me for the sake of the argument). > we pay them for it. [...] But if a software engineer makes software that has clear value... we lament that it's not free? Now we're getting somewhere: we lament that it's not free even when we pay them for it. I would rejoice if we paid them to make the software free.