Calling people greedy solely because "it could be worse" is rude and misanthropic. Calling them greedy for wanting a bounty-funded, community contribution to be merged into the community version not just the paywall version is ridiculous to me. Maybe the "shocking revelation" about the open source community is how easily some turn to corporate bootlicking.
On the other hand, the unsympathetic side of me says, "That's the license; those are the rules of the game which everyone voluntarily agreed to; and you don't have to like how some people play the game."
There's no place in FOSS licenses for "Rule #7: Don't do anything that isn't nice."
Sure, and the comment you're replying to also explained the error in your argument in general. Being privileged and exploited are not mutually exclusive. "those are the rules of the game" is not very far from saying "everything that is possible is fair". It's the logic of a bully.
Or should we all be in poverty because you say so? Do you tell your kids to finish their plate because there are starving children in Africa?
This is actually one of the most shocking revelations about the open source community and the attitude of many Hacker News readers.
Most of us live in the best .1% of existence, that has ever existed. Highest income, A/C office, minimal physical toil, no risk of slavery, minimal risk of wars or famines, and on and on.
Life's so good, we need to invent things to convince ourselves we're still being oppressed somehow. Several companies charge $10/mo. for a movie rental? How dare they, pirate them all. Windows wants $120 for a license? Oppression! Last week, some guy wrote a fantastic UI library and wanted $100 per project? Unreasonable, and he's personally greedy!
Our ancestors would've been absolutely aghast at the exceedingly miserly attitude many developers have. We have the largest collection of entertainment to ever exist, and we are entitled to have it all for free because we can? We can have the fruit of hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of hours of labor in exchange for about ~2-3 of our own (a ludicrous cost-benefit ratio historically), and we would rather pick something a quarter as good instead because that's not enough? How greedy are we?
/Rant over.