> until more traditional business-oriented management has begun to restrict the information provided to the public.

Curious to know why you think this cutthroat approach is 'traditional'. Is there another historical background to it? Every account that I've seen, including the origin story of free software (at MIT) and even the rest of your own explanation, seem to suggest that such institutionalized confiscation and hoarding of knowledge is a recent phenomenon - since about the 70s. Am I missing something?

That's a fair and good interjection. The truth is probably that at society scale, both approaches are traditional.

The open sharing approach is traditional for research and academia, while the information restricting approach is traditional for business-oriented thinking.

So, a young field will typically start out fairly open and then get increasingly closed down. The long-term trajectory differs by field, and the modern open-source landscape shows that there can be a fair bit of oscillation.

We're seeing the same basic shape of story play out in generative AI.