I'd even say these ads were just one symptom, we'll see more and more until people realize that yes it's fun to use free(dom) software but if you don't follow the other part of the "contact" of contributing in some way, it's not sustainable. Someone once said on HN that FOSS culture has mixed with startup culture and the startup culture doesn't like the pushback, I suspect it's true.

There are also an increasing number of cases in the last few years of such maintainers moving on, and that infrastructure failing soon after that. The event-stream npm debacle, the left-pad npm debacle, the electron-native-notify npm debacle, the rest-client ruby gem debacle, the strong_password ruby gem debacle...

Single points of failures in underpaid open source maintainers are an amazing security risk to critical infrastructure. "Patching" the labor market of open source to better account for the realities of downstream profits relative to upstream labor efforts, might be at least one way to make the entire ecosystem better for everyone.

That doesn’t seem like a crisis to me. Are some of these critical infrastructure devs threatening to quit work unless they are paid. I’m not a big contributor, but I’m pretty familiar with a French projects and the contributions are made specifically because of the license. OSS licenses are designed to let companies make “billions,” that’s a feature not a bug.

please proof this claim... the majority of open source seems to be sustained extremely well... there are some outliers like OpenSSL and others that have been fixed but the majority is well sustained https://www.aniszczyk.org/2019/03/25/troubles-with-the-open-...