

Corporations are by their nature entities with priorities that are not aligned to the good of society. It is natural and obvious that we do everything in our power to compel them to do the best thing for society rather than the best thing for them.
Also while valve tends to be a pretty fair company they don’t need to be proprietary. Their product is selling game licenses and server space for cloud sync, none of that requires a closed source client. So while valve may be my favorite corpo they don’t get a pass from my previous statement about not being sympathetic to wanting to profit of community projects without giving back.
The exact problem you point out is in my view a feature not a bug because it means there is an economic advantage to someone doing what steam does but open source. Which is exactly the sort of incentive that helps capitalism help people.

Fair enough that’s an argument I hadn’t heard. I must admit “Free but you must keep it free” not being free enough for you strikes me as such a dumb argument I can’t fathom it being made in good faith but fair enough I guess.
Now I will say your comment about durable intellectual property ownership is interesting philosophically but I also don’t agree. No one “owns” GPL code. It’s public for everyone and anyone can fork it or whatever. GPL doesn’t give the original owner any power over others it just requires the code which was born free to stay free.