On a related note I have been wondering why artist's never provide quality content for free. You know graphics/images for games etc and music/sound effects for example.
Coders provide software worth billions in man hours for free and trying to find quality "artistic" content is impossible. Every little clip art image costs many dollars.
Why do coders provide their services for free so generously while artists are mainly worried about their copyrights?
Not true in that absolute: There is tons of freely licensed music out there. You can find free game assets for genres that are somewhat "generic". But still it is a thing, a few theories on contributing factors:
a) More typically an individual work, with one person having a vision that they do not want to have compromised by others. Arguably harder to have contributions in a way that doesn't stand out in many cases, which means one work made by a small army of contributors sharing the workload doesn't happen often.
b) the "work for me for free" demands are worse for artists than for coders. "Freeloading" is seen a lot more critically/abusive than in software circles. (although it does happen with open-source projects as well of course, and long-term maintainers burn out accordingly as well).
c) approximately nobody pays artists to produce freely licensed works
d) free work by artists might be in direct competition to their ability to make money from their art.
e) Parts vs final product: a lot of open-source development is in pieces that other projects build on. Similarly, you can find quite a lot of "pieces" of art for free: sound templates, stock/reference images, textures, ..., which is not very visible to someone looking for "free graphics". Similarly to how many people not involved with software do not understand on what mountain of free libraries a lot of software stands.
f) More visible if reused, which leads users of graphic resources to want individual ones instead of the same as everyone else. E.g. games will more likely stand out by graphics but use the same engine as X other games.
Coders provide software worth billions in man hours for free and trying to find quality "artistic" content is impossible. Every little clip art image costs many dollars.
Why do coders provide their services for free so generously while artists are mainly worried about their copyrights?