If my company was liable to have to pay out for each one of these projects we would be bled dry and our business would no longer be profitable.
To put that another way, your profit is derived entirely from arbitraging the value of open source software for your customers. If you were actually paying what the software is worth to you there'd be no money left. Effectively, you are taking some of the value of the work done by open source developers and keeping it for yourself rather than passing it on (that's not a criticism btw, it's how practically every "supplying goods" type business works.)
That's very unfortunate. You're not really creating much value, so I imagine your business is too small for anyone to worry about. In the case of something like YouTube that clearly that isn't the case though; they create far more value from the open source software they use. YouTube absolutely could afford to pay a fair fee for what they use. If nothing else, it protects YouTube from a problem like the log4j issue this conversation has arisen from.
The math probably doesn't check out. Paying 0.1% (1e-3) revenue for a core business dependency is a no-brainer (if you have reasonable margins). When you go from dozen to hundreds, you will not only bleed dry, you will be paying more than a fair share of what is needed to sustain/develop the dependencies.
When your software is used by billions (1e9), a adequate/fair share may be around 0.00001% (1e-7) with huge variability, but try paying 2c for your favorite logging library, 3c for gcc, 1c for task manager, 0.1c for a tool you never heard of ...
It's not even shared infrastructure like roads, since software is durable and the cost of use (and copy) is zero. Free and open source software is like science and technology. Like the modern wheel, candle, and cooking.
Plus some folks are tweaking and fine tuning it from time to time to be compatible with road 5.2 and with axle 3.1 and so on.
GitLab uses a delayed release (open core). Paying customers get the features first and months/years later they get into the free tier.
To put that another way, your profit is derived entirely from arbitraging the value of open source software for your customers. If you were actually paying what the software is worth to you there'd be no money left. Effectively, you are taking some of the value of the work done by open source developers and keeping it for yourself rather than passing it on (that's not a criticism btw, it's how practically every "supplying goods" type business works.)
That's very unfortunate. You're not really creating much value, so I imagine your business is too small for anyone to worry about. In the case of something like YouTube that clearly that isn't the case though; they create far more value from the open source software they use. YouTube absolutely could afford to pay a fair fee for what they use. If nothing else, it protects YouTube from a problem like the log4j issue this conversation has arisen from.