The maintainer never put a $0 _value_ on their work, but a $0 _public price_ of it "as is, without warranty of any kind, ...". It's some (corporate) users and

The maintainer never put a $0 _value_ on their work, but a $0 _public price_ of it "as is, without warranty of any kind, ...". It's some (corporate) users and markets that understand this (wrongly) as a $0 value. It's their own evaluation that's failing in the long term. Mentioned that in an other comment, but this is akin to mining companies that extract value from natural resources at $0 price (because the resource is just there to pick up). When the resource is depleted (even excluding other externalities like pollution deriving from the extraction itself), no one can reasonably expect that it would cost $0 to regenerate/reproduce the resource or repair the scarcity.