When I say compensation I&#x27;m not restricting it to &quot;monetary compensation&quot;. In this sense, the years of &quot;monopoly&quot; over someone&#x27;s work to benefit from it as they see fit is the actual compensation I was referring to.<p>As a developer, most likely your clients hold the copyright to the code you write, especially if this is not explicit in any other way. And even if you go one step further, the entire free software movement is based on copyright: the existence of copyright is what guarantees software remains free once published. Otherwise, people could just fork the code and close the source again.<p>To your last point, given that copyright already exists, is in place, and lasts for way too long, I believe it&#x27;s the other way around: the burden of the proof lies on whoever wants to change it.