> It created really weird social-structure expectations: that someone who releases code has an obligation to maintain it and get paid nothing for the work.
Fundamentally, yeah that is why it took off. Big tech doesn't sell software anymore, they made it a commodity through open source. Now they sell cloud services or consulting, or ads or your data.
Just read what Eric Raymond said about it: https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/raymond2.h...
> It seemed clear to us in retrospect that the term "free software" had done our movement tremendous damage over the years. Part of this stemmed from the well-known "free-speech/free-beer" ambiguity. Most of it came from something worse--the strong association of the term "free software" with hostility to intellectual property rights, communism, and other ideas hardly likely to endear themselves to an MIS manager.
The intention was to find a business model and market it. That's why they distinguished themselves from FOSS in the first place. It's what you see big tech doing today (that's the business model).
The outcomes being observed and complained about are literally just the expected outcomes of making software a commodity, which is that businesses need to make money and they don't do it by selling software.