I see what you’re saying, but I think there’s a moral argument to be made for wanting code to be open source, but for humans only. Contrary to what law says, corporations are not people.
The contributors likely feel like their altruism is being exploited by mega corporations who are looking to harvest free labor. I sure wouldn’t want to work on a project if that’s how I perceived my users. But that doesn’t diminish their desire to provide a code base that anyone can use, learn from, modify, etc.
You or I, the HN readers, may use Redis to power our personal instance of Firefly III or whatever, running in our home lab, but the average _person_ has no need of Redis so for the purposes of this discourse this is a negligible factor.
Typical contributor to the large scale OSS project is not just an individual either, but most likely acting as an employee of a corporation that uses an open source component and needs certain things in it.
There is very limited number of essentially non-commercial licenses. Which makes things hard for this sort of goals. But on other hand some think that such limitations go against open source too...
In my mind there should be no threshold on who should pay for use if they profit. It should not be limited only to mega corporations. You have tens of thousands in revenue, surely you can pay for code you use?
The contributors likely feel like their altruism is being exploited by mega corporations who are looking to harvest free labor. I sure wouldn’t want to work on a project if that’s how I perceived my users. But that doesn’t diminish their desire to provide a code base that anyone can use, learn from, modify, etc.