There I didn't use the word "exploited".. are you happy now?

> I did not want to contribute to OSS anymore because watching other people make money off of my unpaid work made me feel undervalued and resentful.

Again, what did you think was going to happen to work you freely made available for people to use as they saw fit. They used it as they saw fit.

You are complaining that people did what you expressly allowed them to do. It's probably best that you stopped contributing, you clearly didn't understand what you were doing.

Community-developed software kinda runs on a stone soup model -- everyone brings something to the pot, everyone gets something back OUT of the pot, everyone gets something that is better than the sum of the parts contributed to it. This can be a good thing. It doesn't stop you from being miffed if you figure out that there's a restaurant in town that's coming, dropping off a bit of mirepoix, hauling off a cauldron's worth and selling it the next town over.

And in the macro sense, there are a lot of companies who have figured out how to use the communities that have developed around open source and free software as a low cost to free source of labor. And important infrastructure products like OpenSSL end up being used EVERYWHERE but starved for resources because everyone can just freeride off the work of a few people until something like Heartbleed comes along and exposes the costs of it. And there's probably at least a few products that are in the same boat as OpenSSL and we just won't know what those are until the next Heartbleed. And it makes it really, really hard to solve these problems when we can't even talk about them openly without people being personally attacked for discussing it.

That's a nice idea, and many people do operate that way, but in no way is it required, enforced or the norm.

Most people use OSS without ever contributing back. They find what solves a problem they have and they use it. They can do this because the explicit license allows them to do it. You might have had the intention of 'share and share alike' but the explicit permissions say otherwise.

> It doesn't stop you from being miffed if you figure out that there's a restaurant in town that's coming, dropping off a bit of mirepoix, hauling off a cauldron's worth and selling it the next town over.

It makes your anger over it occurring irrational.

Here's why you might consider contributing to OSS even though others use it to make money:

If you have contributed to a successful project it's a major leg up in getting hired by someone using that project

If you use that product in your own work, then you are paying that benefit forward and can expect some (additional) returns in the future

If you learn something new/interesting that is outside of your normal work-a-day stuff

Seriously, companies typically give zero shits about which software license you personally prefer, they just want to be able to look over what you have accomplished.

If your code is popular, why not offer support to, or seek out sponsorship from, the companies that are using your modules/applications? A revenue-focused startup is probably a bad resource to tap for this. But getting a few companies to spread out a few hundred dollars each from their engineering/marketing budgets isn't completely unlikely.

Otherwise, you can always recite the age-old mantra to cleansing open source entitlement resentment: "Patches welcome."

Come to think of it, it's not even clear you could effectively write such a license for software (the analogous artistic license is generally about performance/broadcast, which doesn't have an equivalent in software). Once the user has received the code from the licensor, legally the situation is out of the licensor's hands _except for the issue of redistribution_, which is what the GPL restricts.

I'm honestly not sure what you wanted. You contributed code to something, and people used it. Some of those happened to make money on code that included yours (I'm sure the impact yours had on their bottom line is debatable). Did you expect financial compensation? Did you just hope for whatever reason that nobody would make any money off any code that you wrote? If you didn't want people to "avoid" your software, you wanted them to use it, right?

I occasionally write stuff for my own use that might be of use to others. There's no downside to me if I release it, and the occasional upside.

Sometimes I need to apply a fix to some OSS project. Contributing helps me avoid having to maintain a fork.

Sometimes I write something at work that may be useful for others and convince my employers to let me open source it, and as a result I am also able to reuse the same software at home or in future jobs.

None of these have deprived me of income. Some of the work I was paid for. Some of it has indirectly led to income.

I find your expression of resentment curious. Their use of your software did not deprive you of anything other than in your own mind.

OSS is freely given, sometimes by people who are paid to do exactly that. The term "unpaid labor" has a specific connotation akin to slavery or indentured servitude. The two are not comparable.

Complaining that someone somewhere makes money (at best, indirectly) from an OSS contribution is the same as complaining that Good Will resold my donation at a profit.

Is this a legal term of art or common knowledge definition? It was unknown to me so I've tried some googling and am turning up primarily volunteer work and unpaid internships under that title. I know wikipedia isn't the greatest source, but over there "unpaid work" is a class of things including both slavery and working at a family business or coop.

It has nothing to do with whatever political axe you have to grind.

It sounds a bit like you're buying a round of beers for everyone in the bar, and then you're upset people didn't compensate you for it.