Imagine in your spare time that you wrote a book. Let’s say it was the worlds best book on painting houses. You figured out how to paint a house in the most efficient and attractive way possible and decided to share it with the world. Now, lets say that you believe that information is meant to be shared and it is wrong to charge people for your book. Or maybe you think it is impossible to get people to read your book since house painters don’t generally buy books or something. Either way, you decide that the only way to do it is to publish your book and put it in a library.
Fortunately for you, there are book publishers who are willing to publish your books for free, and they maintain libraries where people can borrow your books indefinitely. So you upload your book to them and they start printing your book and people start reading and using it. Everyone loves it. Of course, no book is perfect so you start getting suggestions from readers on things that could use fixing. Some of them ask questions they would like answered in future editions of the book. You are excited about the subject and gladly take suggestions.
Then somewhere down the road you start getting tired. You feel obligated to your readers, and your readers feel entitled to your book you’ve given away for free. Some get really annoyed when you don’t answer their questions or fix your typos quickly enough. It’s frustrating. You are the world’s expert on painting houses and everyone expects you to work for free. And then you find out that some big suburban developers are using your book to build enormous subdivisions and make millions of dollars without paying you a dime. Sure, they acknowledge you to their clients in the bottom of the contract nobody reads, but they are using your work in ways you didn’t want to make money you’ll never see.
So you make some changes to your next edition. Now when people take the book to their job sites to paint their houses, it explodes.
Open Source Software is like this. People commit a lot of time and energy and passion creating software that is then used by millions of people. It’s a demanding and often thankless job. I totally empathize with the frustration of feeling taken for granted. But to sabotage people and extort them for money because you decided corporations make too much money off your project?
Here’s the thing: I’ve written software for years. I’ve written software that only I have used, and I’ve writted software used by millions of users. Do you know how much more effort it took me when a million people used my code than when I was the only one? None. Code has no marginal costs. Unlike a book that might cost money to publish for each person, code costs you nothing. Especially when you’re hosting it on a service given you for free because you are doing free work.
One could argue, and many have, that the support burden increases with the increased number of users. If you feel obligated to do everything people ask of you, then that’s a personal problem. I know it’s hard to say no, but it’s a crucial skill. Taking out on others your frustration with your lack of that skill is wrong.
It doesn’t cost you any more for more people to use your software. So if you want to write your software, by all means write your software. If you feel like it isn’t worth your time to write your software for free, then don’t write your software. If you would really like praise or money for your work, then go sell your product to comapanies - either by asking for donations or by selling the code. But throwing a tantrum and destroying your software because you don’t like someone making a lot of money off of it? Greedy and immature. Grow up.
On an additional note, equating your whining that you don’t make enough money to a person who was literally driven to suicide by the abuses of the US judicial system? That’s disgusting. You should be ashamed of yourselves.