> The company that goes and builds this themselves instead of paying a small fee for it, would be a pretty stupid company haha...

There is a fork without the adware now, so the smart company will use the fork to get rid of the stupid ads.

https://github.com/WedgeServer/wedge

> Or just pay the person who worked hard on the project and not be a selfish prick.

and got granted $50.000 to maintain an open source project. Maybe that person who "worked hard" should give back the money, instead of being a dishonest "prick". And let's be frank, caddy is a fucking mashup. the great majority of its functionalities come from Go std lib or 3rd party libs, maybe caddy should give money back to them and all its contributors as well.

Absolutely! I really think that should be payed forward as well, I'd love to do the same with my projects since they lean heavily on other work, but ultimately you have to become sustainable first or there isn't much to give back.

The only alternative is to do the typical VC route, have some startup that makes zero revenue and just hacks on OSS, which is a bigger drain on the economy and I don't believe produces better work anyway.