The GnuPG maintainer is begging for nickles, while most commercial investment into open source is incidental to some other activity that generates the real money. Those aren't good things. When you make it difficult to monetize a product, you create a huge incentive for companies to vertically integrate until they control part of the stack that can be monetized. E.g. Android can exist as open source because it's an on-ramp to Google's proprietary web services.

If companies like Qualcomm couldn't directly monetize their R&D, the likely end result would be their getting sucked up into companies like Apple and Samsung that build end-user products.