[zanny]

There are plenty of lucrative business models behind free software - look at anything from Red Hat, who uses support contracts to fund development, to Krita, which uses crowdfunding each year to fund full time development. And within that spectrum you have projects like Qt, which offers proprietary licensing to appease lawyers to fund development of what will soon be a fully open source toolkit. Gitlab is doing fine despite their platform being open source, too.

At that, I agree that when you are offered a government enforced monopoly on information, that will be much easier to extort revenue from users with than trying to use one of these alternative means of funding development and profiting from information creative work. But like you said, its wholly imaginary and artificial.