This implies that they are only being paid for their added value, when in real situations they are often getting all of the benefit as they are in control of the customer relationship at that point; if a system like redis allows you to build something really complex and profitable with only a few days of effort (whether it be another developer tool or a website for end users that allows you to comment on cat pictures), when it took antirez an immense amount of time to build redis itself, then the question is whether the value you got for your profitable business is really yours to have, or whether "by all rights" a good chunk of it should have gone to antirez (who then might use it to cause more open code to exist, such as working on redis).
In this case, honestly, antirez's opinion seems to have an internal contradiction. On the one hand, he is perfectly fine with someone taking the things he's done, forking them for their purposes, making something theoretically valuable out of it with minimal effort, and then sequestering all of the value. On the other hand, his article clearly states that what he feels is missing in the world of open source is that the people who make the systems that people rely on to build their empires don't get paid for it, and don't get any money in return to pay their time to maintain their software. As someone who made this same mistake on various occasions, this really seems like someone who has caused their own problem: giving something away for free under the least restrictive license possible, and then wondering why they are unable to hold on to any of the value from it.
To quote his article:
> In my opinion instead what the open source does not get back in a fair amount is money, not patches. The new startups movement, and the low costs of operations of many large IT companies, are based on the existence of so much open source code working well. Businesses should try to share a small fraction of the money they earn with the people that wrote the open source software that is a key factor for their success, and I think that a sane way to redistribute part of the money is by hiring those people to just write open source software (like VMware did with me), or to provide donations.
^ antirez: If you really believe this, why not encode it into your license? You could easily say "if you want to use this for a project larger than X or making more than Y, you have to be willing to hire me in a support capacity". Alternatively, why not use one of the existing "tried and trusted" open source business models, such as "redis is awesome, but it is under a restrictively-free license; if you wish to use it for a purely selfish and commercial purpose, you thereby must contact me to get a special re-licensing of this program for your purposes, the royalties from which can be used to pay costs associated with redis, hire people (including myself) to work on redis, and generally can compensate the community for the success that using our product will bring you". Yes: the (A)GPL is the common license used to cause that to happen.