(the dwarfs dev would have to work it out amongst all who contributed to his repo)
What I'm saying is that due to the license fewer companies want to use and thus we're getting a bit worse products as a consequence.
Of course I completely agree the developer should get licensing income (heck, that's in my self interest as well!), but what's going to really happen is that the cheapo companies just make do with less and use SquashFS or whatever instead.
It's a tragedy of commons there's so little will to donate for or crowdsource open source projects and that they're taken for granted.
Which is not made better by your sentiment? I mean GPL at least forces you to either try negotiating a different license with the author (for money ideally), or suck it and use something inferior. Using a permissive license that allows multi-billion dollar companies to use your code for free certainly doesn't help changing the mind set of "open source is other people working for me for free".
Sounds great in theory, but even for a popular open source library developer this happens so rarely that it rarely pays the bills regardless of license.
"Using a permissive license that allows multi-billion dollar companies"
Most embedded devices by far are not developed by multi-billion dollar companies. Their legal departments are also actively steering away from GPL licenses.
"try negotiating a different license"
In my experience, by far the most companies don't want to negotiate anything. If there's a product with a set price, yes, then it might be purchased. They typically also want some kind of product support with it.
"use your code for free certainly doesn't help changing the mind set of "open source is other people working for me for free"."
How to solve this? Ideally the library developer would get paid AND the consumers get more value for their money. This would encourage more developers to write useful libraries that provide great value in the big picture, but are uneconomical or otherwise too much trouble to deal with on an individual company or product level.
As it is, everyone seems to lose.