This line of reasoning makes sense, but so far the evidence has been contradicting it completely... France is borrowing at the cheapest rates it ever has.
The academics in question might have little choice but to give away some/most of the content for free, as it is often mandated by university- or department-level policy. At least as far as internal use of the courses is concerned, the incentive here is clear for the university: reduce your dependency on a given superstar prof leaving (very slightly, admittedly).
As for the ego trip, I doubt it (in most cases): research gives you the recognition of your peers. There is a clear trade-off in allocating your time towards stellar teaching or stellar research. Few professors manage both. And stellar teaching tends to get much lower recognition from the peers.
What if they sold their code to a different entity, which would rebrand the app and use a different token? Marketing issues aside, wouldn't it buy them slots for 100k new users?
When you download a paper from JSTOR or ScienceDirect, it is quite easy for them to add various watermarks to the PDF, and they already do (mildly). It might make it harder to scale this concept if the provider can track down who initially downloaded the paper (and presumably shared it).
See for instance: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/30/markets-bonds-idUS...