Who are we to dictate terms to or divine the intentions of someone who releases software with say the MIT license? It might sound surprising but a lot of developers just want to share their work altruistically. There are some you couldn't pay if you wanted to. It's all voluntary.

> FOSS simply isn't sustainable if you want to make a living out of it.

This is probably true enough. Yet there are a million open source projects that existed, some for decades. There has go to be another way and another motivation.

> even those that don't actually matter to users that much - at the expense of the rights of developers

I would assume those developers would use a different license or even create their own terms.

> The only ones benefitting from the current situation are BigTech.

Paying the original developers will not change this. Big tech is big. They take whatever they can, sometimes killing the original project in the process. Perhaps a license like GPL is the solution to that particular problem.

I don't mean to come off snarky. I do agree with a lot of the things that you're saying but I see the free software movement as a completely voluntary and human thing. You could not get rid of it if you wanted. Paying for it is an auxiliary thing and concentrates too much on the wrong thing IMO. A lot of free software developers are already gainfully employed, some are millionaires. Yes some are struggling but then they are still voluntarily sharing their work with the whole world. That must mean they have their valid reasons for doing so.