We have seen this time and time again. Open source libraries/authors begging for a pittance while the large projects built on top of them are flush with cash. Sure there are success stories like Blender, but those are products of survivorship bias. There is no reason that OpenCV should be struggling to get 500k with all the projects that use it.
It's really crappy that large organizations can still keep benefiting from these projects without putting any resources into them. Again I know some companies have donated to open source projects, or hired developers but that is the exception. Part of me wonders if Copy left viral licenses are the only way to combat this. If you are going to use a bunch of critical open source projects in your code base, and you aren't going to pay, you should at least pay it forward by making your source code available.
I've seen some people mention creating some sort of license that is Open source, but if you make more than X amount of money or have X amount of employees then you have to pay X amount in licensing fees. That seems reasonable and still allows small projects to still use these libraries like they always have. But then again that's pretty hard to enforce. And if the GPL is anything to go by, then a license doesn't necessarily stop flagrant misuse of the software anyway
It's really crappy that large organizations can still keep benefiting from these projects without putting any resources into them. Again I know some companies have donated to open source projects, or hired developers but that is the exception. Part of me wonders if Copy left viral licenses are the only way to combat this. If you are going to use a bunch of critical open source projects in your code base, and you aren't going to pay, you should at least pay it forward by making your source code available.
I've seen some people mention creating some sort of license that is Open source, but if you make more than X amount of money or have X amount of employees then you have to pay X amount in licensing fees. That seems reasonable and still allows small projects to still use these libraries like they always have. But then again that's pretty hard to enforce. And if the GPL is anything to go by, then a license doesn't necessarily stop flagrant misuse of the software anyway