Comment by rapnie

> So who exactly has been harmed?

Society, because your free work gives big tech the continuous headstart to focus on bottom line and forget about externalities. Look at current society and how much everyone is cranking their tech out fast as possible, including free software folks who start coding on the first hint of an idea. Starting hobby, then comes popularity and subsequently big tech adoption (read: harvesting of low-hanging fruit) so they can do more of their thing: ruthless value extraction.. from society. We are not talking healthy circular money flows, big tech is billionaire class leaning stuff, imho.