How many companies paid $0 for log4j2, and then got upset and bashed the authors of it when this bug happened for the cost it caused to their business?
People pay nothing for the software, but will expect paid quality support.
People pay nothing for the software, but will expect paid quality support.
It's some (corporate) users and markets that understand this (wrongly) as a $0 value. It's their own evaluation that's failing in the long term.
Mentioned that in an other comment, but this is akin to mining companies that extract value from natural resources at $0 price (because the resource is just there to pick up). When the resource is depleted (even excluding other externalities like pollution deriving from the extraction itself), no one can reasonably expect that it would cost $0 to regenerate/reproduce the resource or repair the scarcity.
The "work" you're talking about is the development of the software. The post you replied to was talking about support:
>> People pay nothing for the software, but will expect paid quality support. [Emphasis added -- CRC]
Valuing what's there to freely download at this instant in time is one thing; bugfixes on top of that are support, which is a different thing.
If you get something for free, you don't have to pay for it; if you want something more on top of that, you may have to pay for it. That's how a market works.