Are you implying that the author is so much reliant on this specific business model that they would likely end up homeless and starving to death if they were deprived of it?

Don’t be silly, no.

But the chance that they would quit this job and go work on open source code for a living is about 0%. Would you rather they go make proprietary code for a megacorp instead? Nobody seems to single out Google engineers for abuse when it comes to FOSS vs proprietary, it’s always the little guys who get all the abuse.

He did not get abuse. He got one or two responses two years ago that said that they'd prefer this to be FOSS, I'd prefer Google's tools to be FOSS too.

Context. I’m talking about GP.