I’ve heard an argument that people / companies would still pay for custom development, like they do now. It is a pretty weak argument, but I do see the point.

Sure, custom development could still be a thing under such a framework because there is only a single potential user, but can you imagine how catastrophically expensive that would be? The business of software development would be absolute misery to work in as the core skill would be to write such convoluted, impenetrable, single use code at the pain of being put out of business by source code copiers. Software would be completely out of reach to most consumers and small businesses. Basically we would be back in the 70s where computing was only available to large enterprise.

I'm with you until the final sentence. From my perspective, that's the current state of software development. Hundreds of megabytes of JavaScript and "assets" for what could be a 60KiB bundle of HTML, or a 500KiB Win32 program.

Yeah, the reality is, our industry produces a lot of garbage right now. That wouldn’t change.

Still, there are people who care about quality, and some of them also share their work with others. Those people would exist regardless of whether there is copyright or not. The only difference is, we won’t have LICENSE files anymore.

Forgot the name, but it's a variant of Hawthorne's laws for computers. If tech gets faster, programs will work to fill that newfound space and performance. even if it's just a simple web text page.

But no one complains and it lets them ship faster. So not much will change here.

> But no one complains and it lets them ship faster

I think we’re past even that point by now. Not only the code we ship now is slow, it’s also harder to build and maintain, and expensive to run. I have no idea how we got here to be honest.

It's called Wirth's law.