[gtewallace]

I've worked in open source for two decades and something that I've observed that I think is as close to a law (as in law of physics) as anything I've seen is the 90 | 9 | 1 ratio.

90 percent of any community - the Hacker News community, reddit, x, or any open source community - will be passive consumers.

9 percent will be contributors - as the reply below says, through feedback, testimonials, bug reports and the like.

1 percent will be creators - new features, innovations, fixes.

This is the way it is. "Freeloading" is a very very unfortunate term and I wish it had not been inserted into the popular lexicon. The creators of open source that I know WANT their software to be used.