Publishing source code doesn't preclude making money off it. There are many natural experiments in this category, where source code of proprietary products was leaked with little ill effects. It's happened eg to Windows, many games, VMware... This pretty closely models the scenario of making source code public but not giving anyone license to use it for purposes other than study.

Linux is also made of millions of man-hours of work and yet it is free and Free and it has become a great gift to Humanity as a whole.

I think patents exists for this very reason.

But software patents are clearly a scam, too.

They have been rewarded for their work. Perhaps there should be limits on these rewards?

this is a seriuous problem with all digital products and comes down to fixed vs. variable costs: - development costs are fixed costs- they are independet of the number of products sold. - production costs are variable costs- they have to be paid for every unit sold.

as digital copies in most cases have no or negligible variable costs (support may be regarded as variable) the earnings for certain products can be way out of any sensible relation- but who should say: enough is enough? als long as there is no sensible answer to this question there can only be one: let the market decide...

> let the market decide...

Are you talking about a market with or without a regulated strong copyright law?

This is a great question. What would the world look like if no individual could earn more than a million dollars a year, or if companies were taxed at exceedingly high rates once they reached a valuation of 100 millions dollars?

I realize it would be tricky to implement, but considering the societal benefit of more even wealth distribution the idea itself is worth exploring.

As determined by who?

Well clearly if the rewards included all the money on the planet, that would be egregious. It seems fairly likely that there would be limits that are lower than that (all the money in a country) and possibly below that....