Patents/copyrights have a long tradition of taking things in the open source community and limiting their access for profit.
Post-it notes are a good example. For a hundred plus years print shops would take their scrap paper, jog it in stairsteps, apply rubber cement (or similar) and quickly collapse the stair-steps to create post-it noted. It was in the public domain. It never occurred to anyone that this open process could be patented. Then 3M came along with a hokey story and a great PR blitz that snowed people into believing it could have exclusive ownership fo what had been in open source for a century.
The status of some code is curious. Sears and IBM created ADVANTIS. Then Allstate, Discover, Coldwell-Banker children of Sears continued to USE ADVANTIS as did unrelated firms like Spiegel. As a consultant I could bounce from shop to shop and have access to all that code I knew had come from other shops. Every shop encouraged all designers and coders to “steal” the code already written. And yes, the word “steal” was used in writing with the flippant inference expected. ADVANTIS expected it to be a big selling point that such a large base of proven re-usable code was available to ADVANTIS users.
For various reasons IBM and Sears didn’t know how to capitalize on what they had. The potential was barely touched.
For one, print shops put the glue on the back to stick sheets together, not quite like Post-Its. 3M invented a special adhesive for between the sheets that could be re-used and didn't leave a residue, another guy invented the application as Post-It notes.