alt Hacker NewsBut 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.
I agree. Just free/open data, does cost someone.
In science, it is the government that funds a lot of research. Specifically because the free market does fail at this.
A lot of tech success is built on top of government funding. In this analogy, the funding for people to eat while producing the free stuff for others to found tech startups upon.