[indubitable]

A few things in no particular order.

1 - It's not holding back anything. If this invention has any merit, it will be licensed and society at large will benefit from it.

2 - Incentive. If this inventor could not make a guaranteed profit from this idea, I imagine he could have found more interesting ways to spend his time than playing with floating point numeric representations. It's not like he stumbled upon this on the road and then hid it from society. He set out to create things like this as a means of sustaining himself and improving the world at the same time.

3 - The reason markets are useful is because they work phenomenally well at determining value. As we swapped to currency operated markets over barter, nobody ruled a chicken was worth 3 coins, a pig 10, and a cow 25. Instead market forces decided, and tend to do better than any other means of measuring value. Donations, let alone bureaucracy, are extremely poor substitutes in determining the value of anything. Their ideal would be to approach market force level efficiency. This isn't to say markets are flawless, but rather they're a whole let less flawed than any alternative.