content: How about we change the context to illustrate what he's actually saying: Pretend instead of software developers, we're smiths. We smelt iron, and shape it into whatever form is desired. This is great, because it's way stronger than lead or copper, and so our new iron tools etc. are the best around. Then one day Tom Smith makes an iron ingot that's way harder than any other iron ingot that he's ever made before. Instead of just saying "that's weird" and keeping on making iron ploughs and pokers and soforth, he gets obsessed with figuring out exactly what happened to make this 'hard iron'. His smithy suffers, his family get poor, everyone mocks him at the winter dance. What an idiot. But he perseveres. Eventually he figures out that if he smelts the ore with enough charcoal, and gets it hot enough, he gets something different from the fire: Not just iron, but steel. The years of suffering and hard work have paid off, Tom gets rich, and not just Tom Smith but everyone in his village benefits from the strong steel tools that he's learned how to make. Now, in Stallman's world, what Tom Smith has done is immoral. He's invested his time and resources into creating something new, and then dared to claim that this new thing is his because he paid for it. But Stallman says that Tom is wrong unless he publicly shares exactly what he did to create the steel. Maybe some people remember that it was Tom who first figured out the process, but by this stage it's too late for Tom. His family have starved, and next time someone sees something weird, they remember what happened to Tom, and they ignore it in favour of doing what everyone knows works well enough. In my world, Tom Smith paid for the knowledge he gained with his time and efforts, and then he owns that knowledge. Others can figure it out by asking Tom, or by likewise working it out from first principles. But Tom's investment is rewarded, because for a while he's the only smith around who knows how to make steel. And so next time some apprentice smith thinks "that's weird", they're willing to risk their time and money in order to figure out what's going on, just in case it turns out to be another trick like Sir Tom discovered, which made their whole town strong enough to defend itself.