[throwaway323929]

It's easy to blame evil companies for attempting to monetize OSS, it's harder to accept that a lot of the reason for more company focused OSS is that indie OSS devs were historically treated poorly, not just by companies but also by entitled users within the OSS community. A poignant example years ago was "devs" with empty GitHub commit histories coming into the OSS community to harass small projects into adopting their badly made and legally untested codes of conduct (and then attacking the individuals running those projects when they pushed back).

When you're not being paid to do something, the only benefit you get aside from software you use yourself is friendly peer recognition, and when it becomes too abrasive, when people are treating you like politicians and trying to scare you into adopting their political views, when users come in and trash talk your project like they're your boss because you didn't implement some feature they want, a lot of people just give up and leave. I largely left the space because of this, and a lot of really good OSS contributors I knew did too.

I'm not sure what the solution is at this point but it's probably not a continuation of the entitlement mentality, purity tests and witch hunts that this site is perpetuating.