If he thinks it is so important for humanity, he should consider to open source it..
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Perhaps he will, one day, but for now the large staff he has working for him all depend on sales of Mathematica to feed their families.
Curating the data sets behind Wolfram Alpha (and Mathematica) is a hugely labour-intensive endeavour. Mathematica itself depends on a large team of extremely well educated people; the pan-scientific domain expertise is significant in that company. Jeopardising that with a radical change of business model, like open sourcing Mathematica, would not be the choice of a sane businessman.
IMHO Wolfram would benefit from open-sourcing Mathematica, and continuing to license Wolfram Alpha (possibly through a 'Pro' version of Mathematica with unmetered Wolfram Alpha API integration).
If he open sources it, and the company goes bankrupt without that income source, it will bitrot and cease to be important for humanity.
The system has to self sustain somehow.
If you want a similar system that is completely free and GPL, look at Maxima. It originates in DOE Macsyma and is Mathematica's direct predecessor. Since the company went bankrupt, the development went on at a glacial pace. Mathematicas commercial develompent model overtook it several times.
We are going to make the core Wolfram Language available as a cloud computation type platform in the near future. The main idea is that anybody should be able to run Wolfram Language code using their browser as a frontend, without necessarily having a license.
Specifically, I would be very surprised if small programs are not free for anyone to run, and if we don't offer some free tier (X minutes of kernel time a month).
Really, we have a strong interest in making WL ubiquitous for doing algorithmic and knowledge-based work. That does certainly mean opening it up more, though as some other people have pointed out, that is probably not going to take the form of open-sourcing the kernel [at least, not until we have different revenue streams in place].
While this would be lovely, it could be applied to tons of software (stretching the "important for humanity" piece as necessary and feels a bit fallacious. As scrumper says below, sometimes a piece of software is too large or expensive of an endeavor to be done for free. I don't think we can fault Wolfram (the company) for that. Also consider that in any other industry, this would be a crazy request (except perhaps for the pharmaceutical industry, but that's its own can of worms). We're lucky that in software, some people will oblige our request to use what they make for free and change it too.