[pmjordan]

This is certainly true for the big headline projects. For every one of those, there's a hundred small but widely used libraries or tools whose sole maintainers (or tiny groups of maintainers) struggle under the workload of keeping it going, as they do so in addition to whatever pays their bills - with no obvious route to recompense for that unpaid labour. Worse, large users of the tool or library get to make modifications without sharing them with the original author and rest of the world.

the idea that free software is primarily done unpaid is just a myth, as can be seen from the attendees of any major free software conference

I'll point out that just because you mostly see delegates from big businesses to FOSS conferences, that doesn't mean this is a representative sample. It can just as well mean that the long tail of contributors isn't able to attend.

Of course, had the maintainers of the small-but-popular tool/library chosen a license under which the big corporate users were forced to contribute any local modifications back, this may in itself have prevented the popularity of the tool or library in the first place. Because for many developers and companies, using an AGPL (or even GPL or LGPL) licensed tool or library is absolute anathema.

(GPL in whatever form of course does not help with financially compensating independent developers, so it wouldn't fully solve the problem.)