Whoa. I was going to comment, but now…

I'm Chris from Airwindows. I'm patreon-backed and make upwards of fourteen HUNDRED dollars a month to serve a specialty market, audio plugins, that is heavily burdened by selfish devs and burdensome DRM strategies. Some of these companies are maybe million dollar companies but many are relatively small fry who still believe they 'should' get 240k (as if! This is still the music business! Or you could say that nothing in the music business is actually popular, therefore none of these can count as popular projects were they OSS)

I license by MIT license. My pitch regarding that is that I require credit, and nothing else. From my point of view, in my business (again, the music business) since long before I was born, the only people who get to be 'popular' are those who sign off on horribly exploitative contracts and get abused just like the OSS developers people are talking about. I assume it'll be the same with me so I allow 'exploitation' on the grounds that I generate enough goodwill to slap back at anyone who's found to be ripping my stuff without credit or shout-out. It's my problem to turn that into revenue.

I can easily believe the '1% to 10% of what you'd make commercially' line. I'm seeing more like 20-25% of what I would make commercially, but if you are an entrepreneur you must consider cashflow. The commercial thing is bursty: feast or famine, and it drives you in perverse directions, makes you play to your impression of what will be the most popular thing.

If you market yourself as an OSS dev free to do anything creative regardless of market pressures, that's its own demographic. It's working okay for me, because I do not have to pay Silicon Valley housing costs, or employees. Like Robert Fripp, I am a 'small, independent, mobile and intelligent unit'.

Why?

You said freeloaders. That angers me. I have a different name. I call them 'musicians'. Often they make the musics and genres I personally like. They also have to eat. I am able to provide them with tools that become their resources. I'd do more if I could: working on it.

If you aren't living on under $1500 a month you have no business calling a sum of money a 'pittance', and in no case do you get to tell me to hold my software hostage. (so I won't. No hard feelings)

You appear to be talking from a 'capital maximization' position, and from that angle all you say checks out. I am talking from a 'providing freedom' position, from which the actions of companies mean diddly-squat. I am there because should they license my stuff (some is trivially simple, some is quite significant) they will take my musicians and hold them hostage and demand a 'pittance', or better yet they'll demand 'a lot' simply because they can.

My musicians (or at least many of the worthy ones) are starving broke, because art does not make money. OSS is a way for me to make some money in a context people understand while giving these people not only tools, but the RIGHT to own, use, redesign these tools. What I give can't be taken away.

Won't trade that for money.

If that is hard to understand ask RMS. (ironically… since I'm using MIT and not GPL. But he would understand, plus people can take my stuff and extend and GPL it if they like. I could switch to GPL at ANY point, if I wanted)