&gt; <i>While true to some extent, if we want these people to keep making more of this &quot;best content&quot;, we should also enable them to &quot;make a buck out of it&quot;. Else they will (and do) go do something else to make a buck and we&#x27;ll be worse off for it.</i><p>I agree, but there is a subtle difference in mindset here I think a lot of people miss - creating something <i>to</i> make money is a different thing from creating something <i>and</i> making money on it. Instrumental vs. terminal values. We want to have more people building things so that those things exist (i.e. making fun movies so that they&#x27;re fun, or building tools to solve a problem), support them by e.g. making sure they aren&#x27;t bothered by stuff like food and shelter - paying them. What we want to have less is people making things <i>in order to</i> make money off it, because their incentives are to create worst possible thing that still sells.<p>&gt; <i>How often do people get paid for open source projects? How often do people get paid for writing custom, proprietary code? If your answers to these questions don&#x27;t make obvious the fallacy of your statement above, all I can say is you&#x27;re living in a bubble.</i><p>Of course people are paid more for writing propertiary code, and I&#x27;m also aware of the trend to pay people for making open-source code which will be then monetized by e.g. charging for support. But this is irrelevant to the topic. Even most of the tools you use for your daily work as a programmer would still exist if suddenly no one got paid for code anymore.<p>My point is - code and art is something better if done by someone who cares primarily about them than by someone who cares primarily about the paycheck for them.