The OSI model of licensing has its philosophical roots in a very classical notion of universal rights and freedoms. As with all absolutist points-of-view, this

The OSI model of licensing has its philosophical roots in a very classical notion of universal rights and freedoms. As with all absolutist points-of-view, this frustrates some pragmatic people, and/or irks those developers who want to benefit from the publication of their work without large corporations then profiting monetarily from the same work. That's fair, but there's an entire, centuries-old legal apparatus designed to protect the rights of that kind of developer: they should engage a lawyer, craft a license with the correct balance they seek, and pursue to reap the concrete or abstract rewards from their work. But instead, it's en vogue to complain about open source licenses and wonder why the cake can't also be eaten, because developers have a marketshare-scaling problem: they want their software distributed to a wide audience such that it gains usage and mindshare, but not wide enough where AWS is selling their work as a managed service at prices they couldn't by themselves. Attempts by rightholders of software that suffered this fate always try to split the offering into a libre core and a proprietary set of enhancements with various levels of success, while some go down a nonsensical and legally-dubious path of trying to force libre licensing onto proprietary companion software within a larger offering. These demonstrate that giving away libre software may not be a sound business model on its own. Unfortunate for this article's author, the ethical stands he wants other developers to make are quite often good business models. That's to the detriment of all of us. Some amount of people will make a stand, but there will be others who won't, and they'll reap the rewards, and we'll suffer the consequences of their work nonetheless.