Sourcehut seems to be an exception here, Drew not only has a profitable open source business, he not only contributes upstream, but also donate to open source projects.
There are many OSS companies. I think what the OP is (correctly) complaining about is people writing OSS and then getting upset when others sell it, or sell things based on it. I see this attitude creeping into e.g. articles on The Register. If you want to licence your software so anyone can use or resell it, don't be surprised when they do.
It sounds like OP is getting upset when people write OSS and then relicense it in such a way to restrict unfettered usage to provide or maintain a revenue stream.
E.g. Elastic search vs. Amazon (elastic search does run upon the Linux kernel after all)
In my business we derive fantastic value from FOSS, and a huge part of that is the absence of countless other layers of profit between us and the upstream developers. So it makes sense for us to give a piece of that business back. More or less, the core of the business is all sitting atop FOSS projects.
But we’re small, so any contributions reflect that. And we do cumulatively use more FOSS software in our stack indirectly than we can sanely evaluate, so we probably won’t be seen contributing funds to every single one.
The Amazon ES shenanigans is a good example of a different “grade” of this situation, where they’re just money grubbing.
This criticism only applies to the economic rents being extracted aka charging too much and not giving the economic rents to the producer of the economic rent. If you build a product and charge based on the incremental value you provide, there is hardly reason for criticism.
WordPress, Nextcloud, XWiki, Univention, Passbolt are a few other profitable open source businesses doing well. It is possible to sell open source software :-)
Now, maybe it's not as profitable, but not every wants to be as big as Apple or Microsoft.
It’s not very clear to me what the exact funding model is, but I don’t think if Jetpack went away it would make a seismic financial dent in WordPress.org.
A lot of that sponsored core development comes straight from Automattic, which gets revenue from WordPress.com, WooCommerce paid services, Tumblr advertising, and Jetpack too.
Sourcehut is a bit of an oddball though - it's mostly profitable because it's not a free service. As in, if you want to host your product at sourcehut, Drew expects (but doesn't force) you to pay for it[0]. Contributing is free though.
Also helping sourcehut is that it's actual deployment process is uh... Interesting? It's expecting to run on Alpine (and not dockerized Alpine) and you need to be able to supply an email server. The latter especially means that the usual problem of "FOSS hosting with a price label" doesn't really pop up; nobody is going to bother cloning sourcehuts deployment setup without the fees attached because very few people want to selfhost email for a personal instance of FOSS software. (Since self-hosting email is rather annoying for maintenance since your server IP can end up in random blacklists and you won't know until the setup stops working, and sourcehut relies a lot on email.)
[0]: https://man.sr.ht/billing-faq.md - seems to mostly be on a "were not gonna be jerks about it" - "if you're so poor you can't pay for sourcehut on the price given, send me an email and we'll work something out" basis - the goal doesn't seem to be to extract profit from every user and "fuck poor people", which is quite respectable if you ask me.
> it's mostly profitable because it's not a free service.
I don't understand what you mean from this. What service doesn't charge? Either demos/trial versions, or they are actually charging someone else for your activity.
> Interesting? It's expecting to run on Alpine (and not dockerized Alpine)
there's still pleaty of admins who do preferer to not use containers. Conterners shine on "cattle" deployments, if you can get away with pets, that's not really something weird out of the enterprise or new age stuff.
> and sourcehut relies a lot on email.
well, it's literally a service to contribute by email, it would be weird if it wasn't like that.