alt Hacker NewsPeople need to eat.
That's the main flaw in open source. Yes, its a great idea, but why am I working a real job to eat, and spending nights and weekends on a project just as a hobby.
Science doesn't progress very fast using the 'hobby' model of funding. Unless you are rich, and it is a hobby, much like Wolfram Alpha was. He wanted to play with math/physics stuff and was rich enough to self fund.
But science does progress on the free sharing of information. Academics get paid to produce stuff that's free for everyone all the time.
No one is contesting that people who build these libraries should be compensated.
The argument is that if more scientific tools and knowledge are freely (or cheaply) available you lower the barrier to entry to experiment and play with those tools/concepts, which means more people will, which means you'll get more output. How many billion dollar companies are built on software that is open source? All of them have it somewhere in their stack whether they know it or not.