I don't think anyone is being exploited. The work you do for free, and publish online with a permissive license, was meant to be "exploited" by anyone, that's w

I don't think anyone is being exploited. The work you do for free, and publish online with a permissive license, was meant to be "exploited" by anyone, that's what OSS means. Everyone knows that. We still spend time doing it because of, as the author of the blog post correctly mentions, several different, personal reasons. I publish all my hobby projects on GitHub. I have zero expectation to ever get paid for it, even though I know some big companies have used libraries I've written. I am not sure I even want to get paid, as that would increase my accountability a lot! Do I feel exploited?? Not at all. No one asked me to do it. I do it because I like contributing my knowledge and I hope it will benefit someone doing good work some time... even if most beneficiaries are indeed greed, for-profit organizations. I also use heaps of "free" products by these same greedy companies... my website is hosted entirely free (with HTTPS and everything) by Netlify... I also have several project websites on GitHub Pages (free), run my CI on GitHub , TravisCI and, AppVeyor and CircleCI (all completely free), write some code on IntelliJ (Jetbrains), emacs (ok, this one is not from big co.) and VSCode (big bad MSFT) which are all totally free to use. My browser is also completely free, thanks to Mozilla! Sure, they use lots and lots of OSS, but without those, these products might never have existed as the cost to create them from scratch or by paying every single OSS library for use would have been prohibitive. So, I agree with OP, OSS is working just fine.