In my opinion, this a tier away from the fundamental problem -- idealism. Many open source projects have been driven by people that believed that society would,

In my opinion, this a tier away from the fundamental problem -- idealism. Many open source projects have been driven by people that believed that society would, one way or the other, commensurately reward them for their efforts. $0 and open source comes with with immense benefits: trivial adoption, social signaling of various sorts, and sidestepping nearly all the immense hassles and unpleasant issues involved in running a business - taxes, the actual process of accepting money, a gazillion rules and regulations, etc. The idea many people held (and still hold) is that if your project succeeds you'll somehow be inevitably rewarded. But in general this idealism is not really justified. The emergence of distributed computing 'exploiting' open source projects is just another example of reality along the same lines as the person who released an AI art generator and then was surprised when somebody used that generator to produce a piece of art that auctioned for $400k, yet chose to give exactly $0 back to the creator. Distributed computing working to sort of 'centralize' free software is mostly just another example along the same lines. Give something away for free and people will use it, monetize it, and you will generally see nothing particularly substantial in return.