I’m not making a dig at people here. This is just human nature. It’s difficult to see the value in something that you only see as an obstacle.

Open source software is rather unusual. It’s a commune on a massive scale and it gets its value from the generosity of others. in my opinion, it is possibly one of the greatest achievements in the history and future of computing.

However, it heavily depends on copyright to exist. GPL has encouraged (or forced) many companies to contribute to the community when they wouldn’t have otherwise.

Maybe the business models around creation need to be revisited such that interested parties pay for the creation of a product and not distribution of a product.

Where periodically at each stage of that creation you are getting continued buy in that what you are creating has a market demand that will fund its continued creation.

If you are an indie game developer maybe that means making a demo which gets enough interest to fund you spending the time and resources to make a full game, with no expectations for further revenue post-creation, but with its success meaning your next project is even easier to fund the development of and a comfortable lifestyle rinse and repeating.