Blaming "society" is a nothingburger. It doesn't point towards any solution. Ditto "capitalism" (although the OP doesn't go there) --- people pursue desires and respond to incentives; you can call those effects "capitalism" if you like but you'll struggle with them under any kind of economic arrangements.
My self-diagnosis as an unpaid open source maintainer (rr) is that we like to share, the marginal cost of sharing with potentially everyone is close to zero (at least early in a project), so throwing code on Github with a liberal license feels good. It also benefits the project to some extent because some improvements may come back. But then we see rr creating huge value for people, some of whom are very well paid for their work, and none of that is coming back to us, and that seems unfair even though we did technically agree to it --- sure, you don't have to give back, but it would be the nice thing to do. But in software it's very easy to extract a ton of value from dependencies without really noticing, and very hard to give back systematically. So it's the same old story --- perfectly good human instincts aren't a 100% fit for our modern environment.
What if we made it easier to identify the value we're all extracting and contribute back systematically? If we did, maybe we could build social norms around that. E.g. imagine we had tools that monitor your software development workflow, identify the tools and libraries you use, and quantify your usage via some heuristics. Then imagine you integrate something like Github Sponsors so you can allocate $X to support all your dependencies and make that happen at the press of a button. Then imagine we advocate for professional software developers to allocate 1% of their income that way, and agitate for Big Tech companies to make that a policy.
My self-diagnosis as an unpaid open source maintainer (rr) is that we like to share, the marginal cost of sharing with potentially everyone is close to zero (at least early in a project), so throwing code on Github with a liberal license feels good. It also benefits the project to some extent because some improvements may come back. But then we see rr creating huge value for people, some of whom are very well paid for their work, and none of that is coming back to us, and that seems unfair even though we did technically agree to it --- sure, you don't have to give back, but it would be the nice thing to do. But in software it's very easy to extract a ton of value from dependencies without really noticing, and very hard to give back systematically. So it's the same old story --- perfectly good human instincts aren't a 100% fit for our modern environment.
What if we made it easier to identify the value we're all extracting and contribute back systematically? If we did, maybe we could build social norms around that. E.g. imagine we had tools that monitor your software development workflow, identify the tools and libraries you use, and quantify your usage via some heuristics. Then imagine you integrate something like Github Sponsors so you can allocate $X to support all your dependencies and make that happen at the press of a button. Then imagine we advocate for professional software developers to allocate 1% of their income that way, and agitate for Big Tech companies to make that a policy.