I publish all my hobby projects on GitHub. I have zero expectation to ever get paid for it, even though I know some big companies have used libraries I've written. I am not sure I even want to get paid, as that would increase my accountability a lot!
Do I feel exploited?? Not at all. No one asked me to do it. I do it because I like contributing my knowledge and I hope it will benefit someone doing good work some time... even if most beneficiaries are indeed greed, for-profit organizations. I also use heaps of "free" products by these same greedy companies... my website is hosted entirely free (with HTTPS and everything) by Netlify... I also have several project websites on GitHub Pages (free), run my CI on GitHub , TravisCI and, AppVeyor and CircleCI (all completely free), write some code on IntelliJ (Jetbrains), emacs (ok, this one is not from big co.) and VSCode (big bad MSFT) which are all totally free to use.
My browser is also completely free, thanks to Mozilla!
Sure, they use lots and lots of OSS, but without those, these products might never have existed as the cost to create them from scratch or by paying every single OSS library for use would have been prohibitive.
So, I agree with OP, OSS is working just fine.
The dozens of copy-pasted comments left by mbrodersen on the other post can only be interpreted to be against the claim that companies are exploiting open source maintainers here. Under this argument that was copy-pasted dozens of times, companies paying exactly $0 for software set at $0 are behaving in a natural and predictable manner within "the marketplace." It's an unambiguous argument. It's impossible to miss because it was copy-pasted dozens of times.
Now, I didn't notice the dozens of copy-pasted mbroderson comments being flagged or downvoted. Nor did I notice dang explaining to mbroderson that copy-pasting a low-effort "market mechanics" retort throughout a long thread is against the rules of HN.
And now that argument-- which again, was copy-pasted dozens of times on the other thread-- is in the ether. You cannot merely ignore it and claim that "both sides" are somehow saying the same thing. One side clearly isn't, at least a dozen times, copy-pasted.
So I'm curious what you think about the claim that nobody is exploiting anybody here, because if open source devs want greater than $0 from companies that use their software they should charge greater than $0 to companies that use their software.
I think I stated the claim correctly-- if not perhaps mbroderson can copy-paste the argument here.
I do not have real data, but I assume that more than 50% of the effort invested in open source is not directly paid by a company. For the Linux kernel 20% to 30% of the commits come from people doing it as a hobby, the Linux kernel is supported very well by big cooperations.
However, in the case of the Linux kernel just about 8% were unpaid as of five years ago. https://thenewstack.io/contributes-linux-kernel/
I assume that projects like Kubernetes and OpenStack are similar.
Obviously many smaller projects are largely developed by people on their own time. I expect this also applies languages and things like that which aren't largely corporate efforts like Go and Rust are.
The thing is, while there are maintenaners of important projects working for free, the idea that most of major open source development is for free is mostly mythology. Large projects are backed by companies.
A lot of the business models that are exploiting OSS and OSS maintainers are very much parasitic. I think industry needs to be reminded that the first rule of being a parasite is "don't kill the host." That is what is happening as companies monetize open source and then don't support the team creating and maintaining the software they are exploiting.
Then again, I also give my poetry and my (2 completed) novels away for free. I'm not the greatest Poster Child for the Capitalist cause.