Thinking of software as media paints it in a much more obvious light.

There are two forms of media - free and paid. Free media is funded with advertising. Paid media gets paid for by the customer.

The benefit of free media is distribution. It can go anywhere, cheaply, and impact the largest audience. This is a common model for TV & large YouTube channels.

The benefit of paid media is income. Generally, something that is paid for earns more than something that is free with advertising. However, with paid media there's a significant decrease in distribution. If the decrease is large enough, the creator would have earned more by putting it out for free with advertising to increase distribution.

Now, here's the other catch, the benefit of mass distribution is power. Power of perception, mostly. You are now a voice for the vision you are trying to put into the world. You're impacting the way people think, and you're causing them to learn what you want to teach them.

Open source developers of large projects do a chronically poor job at capturing the upside of distribution. That's the issue.

They simply need to have advertising to fund their "media" that has a large distribution, or they need to charge for their "media". Or a hybrid approach works too – ads for freely distributed software and charge for proprietary or managed software.