Open source developers can still release things to everyone for free. Seems fair to say that companies derive value from open source in proportion to their scale. How about a $1m value generated threshold before it's considered impolite for a company to not at least give a little something back?
Ultimately these tools have already been released for free so asking for a rent seeking style payment after the fact is a little bit like sour grapes. What stops me from just forking the project? Really nothing. If anything open source maintainers that want to get paid should look into a model that mirrors the bug bounty programs. Have bounties for features. Generally these projects only really need security updates.
Is it "sour grapes" if I bring a big dish to a potluck to share and I get mildly irritated if someone walks over and takes the whole thing to their table, ensuring nobody else gets any of it? Is it fine if a crowd of strangers shows up to my potluck without bringing anything, takes all the food, and leaves? Should I be able to go to a food-bank-for-the-poor and walk out with a big crate full of food since it's free?
At some point you have to recognize that a lot of our society operates on the expectation that people will behave in accordance with norms so that we don't have to bake every single thing down into extreme rules and have them enforced by armed goons. You're certainly free to ignore norms and do whatever benefits you the most at expense of others, but if other people did that to you constantly you'd probably end up pretty grumpy. There are lots of ways you can inconvenience someone without breaking the law.
Personally, I gave away a very useful free software package for ~4 years that I maintained solo, and multiple corporations repackaged it to sell to people without ever contributing fixes. Then when I stopped maintaining it for free, they all sent me emails offering to sponsor it (at pathetic rates). Seems like my free labor was worth something after all!
It's not a potluck, though. There is no meritocracy, even if you believe there is one.
Instead you brought your big dish to a food stall on a street corner that has the sign "FREE FOOD" in large font. Folks of all backgrounds, shapes and sizes show up and soon your food is gone.
If after that, instead of feeling warm and fuzzy that you did the world a solid, you wonder if any of those patrons were wealthy and could afford to pay for what you gave away for free, then maybe next time you should put a price tag on it.
I mean it's true that once the code is published it's out there. So if you are only interested in the code up to a certain cutoff date I don't think you need to pay.
But that's not how people use them- people commit to a solution not only because it works today but also because they are likely going to keep using it for the foreseeable future. It's the maintenance that is the costly part. Maintaining a library is a lot more involved than producing it and then vanishing w/o a trace.
Ultimately somebody publishing and maintaining a good library is a positive externality for society. It's like giving kids a good education- it helps everyone. So big corporations relying upon open source w/o putting their money up to help allow the actual 'boots on the ground,' so to speak, get the job done, is kind of like getting a good free education as a kid, making a ton of money as a grownup, and refusing to pay teachers along the way.
Most of the open source tools used could be forked and used as is with no need to change them for years. Sure you could say they need security updates but I could also just silo off that stuff from anything important.
In those cases they could take the tool as is and incorporate it into their workflow..make local changes or not.
The problem happens when you want to maintain your version with the current version (for security / features) or push those local changes to the project so you can stop maintaining. At that point you have to assign local resources or hope your patches are accepted which takes usually requires a relationship.
