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"Some are seeing that corporations are the ones making all the money on the back of open source software. "

That is often true, but i guess i try to be pragmatic. I did not create the corporation or do all of that work to make that happen. Maybe people think this is easy, but it's not. it is a lot of work in most cases.

I also get paid plenty. Why should i care that someone else is getting paid more? None of this was ever about making significant amounts of money, and open source is almost certainly a bad model to achieve that for real. It tends to create lots of value and attempts to distribute that value usually destroy it.

I may be weird about this though. I have plenty of friends who have made hundreds of millions or billions building those corporations. I chose not to do that, and instead be happy with what i've got (and i've got plenty) and value different things.

It's not really an issue to me that someone else is making money, I understand I could come off as a budding capitalist who's mad they are missing out on their cut. But that's not the case. I have always felt OSS was an embodiment of human generosity, and it just seems that it's been commandeered by commercial interests. Passionate devs are happy to keep working on it anyway, because it's fun. Their efforts might have been better spent on more altruistic OSS projects, but that's not my decision to make, and I don't exactly lead by example.

> Some are seeing that corporations are the ones making all the money on the back of open source software.

This is true of everything. This isn't a problem with open source, it is a problem with society generally.

The rest of society doesn't give their "business cogs" away for free though. It just strikes me as odd that in a business context, there's the expectation that lots of the software will be free.

> Some are seeing that corporations are the ones making all the money on the back of open source software.

But the value those corporations are creating is embodied in much more than just the software. It's the whole infrastructure they build, which integrates the software into a complete solution that meets users' needs.

> Why would I want to build a tool for corporate infrastructure if they take it and make millions while I run support for free?

If someone is using a corporation's cloud infrastructure that happens to rely on open source tools you made, they're not going to call you for support when something goes wrong; they're going to call the corporation. If the corporation comes asking you about it, you are perfectly free to set the price of your services to them.

Certainly it's the sum of the parts that makes the business valuable. Some of those parts are free, but I guess I just don't understand why they should be in a business context. I am not a budding capitalist who is disappointed that I'm not getting a cut mind you. I just have no desire to contribute to commercial tools for free.

Back to the desire to work on OSS. I used to work on an OSS eCommerce platform for a living, and as an agency we would contribute back. The platform gives us work because it exists, we contribute back. But it's still all commercial software made for monetary gain. Its just tiring, and deters me from working on it after hours. I don't want my whole life to be about making other people money.

Publishing books is still largely proprietary. Yet that is not helping many individual writers or small publishers make much of a living.

Amazon on the other hand...