> There's tons of people being paid to work on OSS, and much of which would still exist by volunteer effort alone.
Those people are largely working on OSS as a hobby or for clout, i.e., to kickstart their career; or, they're working on a loss leader that will (if history is any indication) eventually lead to a license rug pull when they find out GPL/BSD/MIT licenes aren't a path to riches.
I'll concede that hobby projects that have led to Linux, programming languages, etc. do provide valuable connective tissue to the world, but most of the stuff that appeals to the end user isn't OSS.
> I'm being paid to provide a service
If you're like most of us, you're likely being paid to provide a service that depends on copyright as a foundation. Ask your company's lawyer their opinion on what the company would do if your work wasn't protected by it, or if someone broke into your company's source code repos and stole it.
Those people are largely working on OSS as a hobby or for clout, i.e., to kickstart their career; or, they're working on a loss leader that will (if history is any indication) eventually lead to a license rug pull when they find out GPL/BSD/MIT licenes aren't a path to riches.
I'll concede that hobby projects that have led to Linux, programming languages, etc. do provide valuable connective tissue to the world, but most of the stuff that appeals to the end user isn't OSS.
> I'm being paid to provide a service
If you're like most of us, you're likely being paid to provide a service that depends on copyright as a foundation. Ask your company's lawyer their opinion on what the company would do if your work wasn't protected by it, or if someone broke into your company's source code repos and stole it.