It was just the way things were back then. Compilers were expensive too. In the late 80s I saved up my allowance money for months to buy a Modula-2 compiler for my Atari ST. I still remember reading the manual on my way home from the city, floppies in hand.

In the 80s there was a vibrant shareware & public domain scene, but 'open source' wasn't nearly what it is today, and shareware & PD things were mostly utilities, etc. That really took off in the early 90s with the advent of Linux, the Internet, FTP sites. Some of the GNU stuff existed in the late 80s but was mainly only of use to academics until Linux came on the scene.

The upside of the way things were is that lots of people seemed to make somewhat reasonable livings as individual businesses selling software they'd made. People who would be sinking their time into open source projects now were often sinking their time into software that they sold by mail order or through user groups, etc.