How much (in dollars) do you think the contributors of ffmpeg have made due to their work on the project? How much (in dollars) has that project contributed to the media ecosystem? The correlation is probably off by several orders of magnitude
I find it easy to hold these two thoughts in my head:
Some FOSS projects are unable to extract a "fair" share of the economic value their product creates.
Some FOSS projects have marginal or non-existent economic value.
Looking at the article, I see more of the latter than the former. If this had been an opinion piece from Fabrice Bellard, I probably wouldn't have the same critical read. Also, Fabrice has had no problem finding gainful employment. Coincidence? Who knows.
There is a screenshot of his profile in the article. You can pretty easily find those projects by typing in the org and username into GitHub. This was the route to check myself before responding.
