The entire copyright and patent system is built on the principle of forcing the release of IP; it is time delayed in exchange for the legal protections you gain if you opt in to the system. That is the encouragement!

Extending this to enable software access by 3rd parties doesn't feel controversial to me. The core intent of copyright and patent seems to be "when the time limit expires, everyone should be able to use the IP". But in practice you often can't, where hardware with software is concerned.