Ok, but unlike hobby gardening, open source maintainers actually write the core software we all rely on. That's where the analogy falls over - the "hobbyists" a

Ok, but unlike hobby gardening, open source maintainers actually write the core software we all rely on. That's where the analogy falls over - the "hobbyists" are producing a sufficient bounty already, without a profit motive. A lot of them are paid employees of corporations, but those corporations often don't make profit on the open source software they contribute to either. > Machines still need humans to power them. They're like any other tools that need direction and guidance, by humans that possess the innate creativity. Yes but ideas are not copyrightable, only the fixed expression of those ideas in (in this case) written form. If the actual writing of the code is delegated entirely to machines, then software copyrights are dead.