In general, the legal peril of contaminated copyrights made closed-source desktop coding less lucrative. Most if not all current desktop applications from major commercial vendors is at least in part server hosted, or online subscription based.

It is simply a shift from shovel-ware to a service model, and does what DRM did for the music businesses.

Personally, I often release under Apache license as both a gift and a curse... Given it is "free" for everyone including the competition, and the net gain for bandits is negative three times the time cost (AI obfuscation would also cost resources.)

The balance I found was not solving corporate "hard" problems for free, and focusing on features that often coincidentally overlap with other community members. Thus, our goals just happen to align, and I am glad if people can make money recycling the work. =3

Why bandits are not as relevant as people assume:

"The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity" (Carlo M. Cipolla)

https://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidi...