Academic ideas flourish if they are open and free to read (checks Nature & sees 40£ per CompSci paper from the 1950s), computer code scales because it can run day and night w/o human intervention. However money generated from academic ideas (papers) requires multiples of different steps to generate any profit.
This the other meaning I attribute to code scaling.
For example: Google started as an academic paper, #PageRank [0] was patented [1] but wasn’t profitable until advertising via Google #AdWords [2] was developed on top of PageRank.
If google didn’t invent AdWords, it’d be more commercial noise on the Internet.
Reference
[0] http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf