Look, I pay for JetBrains products as well and am happy to do so, but the vast majority of software I use I don't financially contribute to or very little, (a d

Look, I pay for JetBrains products as well and am happy to do so, but the vast majority of software I use I don't financially contribute to or very little, (a donation here and there), yet I extract great value from the gazillions of lines of code I utilize, some of them without even realizing it. So for MOST software we use daily we indeed do not pay, bringing up 2, even 10 examples doesn't help with the fact that these are still exceptions. Now I also happen to be a big supporter of indie artists and my Bandcamp library is in the high thousands of dollars in purchases. > Thanks for what you did, it's really useful, but I've decided to not pay you, but I'm going to keep your output anyway and use it forever. Is indeed exactly the stance many, many commercial companies take when utilizing FLOSS in their products. The Spotify model also mostly benefits your Taylor Swifts, not the indie artists who actually could use it. They don't care about the small guy just as much as many don't care to at least not violate the terms or spirit of the software they use. It is also worth noting that many of the major artists that benefit the most from Spotify are copyright maximalists, which basically means "I not only want to profit off the work I did in my 20s and not allow others to reuse it to build new things, I also want my children to be able to do so 70 years after I die, thank you very much." P.S. Am a free software maintainer myself, but we're talking about monetary contributions here.