Comment by xtracto
This for me yields a more general "generational" discussion:
It seems to me that the current youth generation is less "giving" than previous ones. 70s , 80s and 90s where full of "sharing is caring" mantra. We had people like Stallman, a lot of "crackers" removing copy protection and people just sharing their stuff on an individual level (via edonkey, soulseek, imeem, etc). Same with software, I would never feel "underpaid" for software I release as open source. It's just some code I share, with some open license. If I keep building it, is because I enjoy it.
But now, everyone is driven by monetization so much. Maybe it's the fact that it had gotten more difficult to make ends meet, and everyone is looking for a way ti squeeze a cent.
I just miss those days.
I would say the opposite happened but maybe it depends on how long you've been using Linux or been in those types of circles. Throughout the 90s and maybe until the late 2000s seemingly all free Windows software was released as shareware or otherwise closed source. Now open source utilities are a lot more common as people became more aware of open source, although there still remains some freeware that only makes money from donations where the authors still refuse to release the source for some reason (e.g. Nirsoft tools)