Case in point, software has been growing every year, just take a look at newly invented algorithms on Wikipedia, and they end up in new systems too. Especially in distributed systems where we have innovations like consistent hashing, paxos, etc. Imagine if those algorithms had to be licensed. Want a load balancer? Pay license fees. Want horizontal scaling? License it. Watchdog process? License that. Etc. After all, somebody or some company invented those things and it wasn’t really that obvious beforehand. Should they not be entitled to some share of the profits if it benefits other companies? Yet I’d argue that we’re all better off learning from each other’s work.