Winning the copyleft fight

There's 2 ways of making profit on stock. One is dividend, as you noted, the other is stock price growth. The latter being the far more common one.
It's also the more difficult one, since it depends only indirectly on real world metrics.
Therefore companies put a lot of effort in shareholder PR, ever-growing profits/margins, lowering costs, growing market value, short-term thinking and much more to keep their stock price growing.
Companies that don't have to revert to these tactics can think about other, more longterm factors instead like treating their employees right/better, doing long term work because it'll keep the project in better shape,...
I'll now let you decide on which model is more sustainable, satisfying for employees, etc.