Funny how this works - I know everyone hates the political side of the issue, but this is a classic "commons vs capitalism" problem.

In the original state of things, there is no property and no trade. People live as a community to which they give and from which they receive. That is the original commune, where things such as the land and resources are "commons" and nobody owns them. Where you can go to the forest and hack wood because the forest belongs to noone. That is the modding community and the developers who make free games.

But once the alternative of private property develops, it will automatically attack the commune. Capital demands for investment and growth, so all common property has to be privatised and make profit - people will have to pay the owner of the woods to retrieve wood from it.

In the physical world this communist idea has problems, as we run into issues like limited resources and ware shortages and the tragedy of the commons and the like, and political movements struggle to find an institutional frame to make it work (for example: To avoid the tragedy of the commons, one can use a democratic method of oversight - much like the US National Parks work).

But in the digital world, these limitations do not exist. One person can write a game or a mod and thousands can use it, without shortage. And yet we find capital's necessity to expand and to monopolise everything. Nothing may remain common, everything has to be privatised and serve the motive of profit. That is Gaben right now.

And Gaben's justification is not because he is evil, it is because that is the organic perspective of an owner of property in the capitalist competition:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.