Open source developers, who work for free, are discovering they have power

IMO, asking payment for open source defeats the purpose of open source software. It’s like an artist gifting a work of art and then expecting compensation after it becomes a extremely popular.

I think the real issue is licensing. We need a separate license for companies that use OSS. A license that expects companies to fund bugs/security fixes if they are interested in the outcome.

I think we need something that builds upon GPL and MIT that makes it clear that if a company is making $xx,xxx’s of dollars from an implementation — they must contribute to the project’s funding. Even better, a monthly subscription that GitHub/Gitlab/etc implement that charge companies who use a project and then automatically allocate a % to each project used from the fee.

This would lead to new and different problems, but less “companies are taking advantage of my code” problems. I think it would also incentivize more OSS similar to how YouTube’s ad model made it possible for people to create more content

This article should be subtitled, "What's fundamentally wrong with Open Source?".

It never quite addresses the follow on question, "... and who's fault is it?".