They're being "exploited" in the sense the word is used in the critique of capitalism.
They're producing immense value but other people monetise that value while they're barely receiving any meaningful compensation if at all.
It comes more easily if you accept the definition that working as an employee is inherently exploitative as you need to produce more value than you are paid in wages for your employment to be profitable to the employer (who ideally profits so much from the difference that they are compensated for the economical risk they carry and their initial investment, i.e. capital).
Certainly calling it exploitation carries a value judgement but objectively this is how open source works: in a capitalist system, most labor is exploited and because it's largely uncompensated open source is being particularly exploited.
Yes, and what I meant by exploitation is this: open source is a culture of gifting, either in the form of new projects, or pull requests, donations, or other forms of volunteering. Companies (not all) quite often consciously do not participate in that culture, but still use the code and community to create their surpluses.
Well, that's why the GPL was created: to make it impossible to siphon off profits by building on open source. Of course that is wildly incompatible with how most businesses operate, so the corporate world pushed open source authors towards more business-friendly licenses like MIT and Apache.
Of course what most people overlook with GPL in businesses (as an individual) is that as using the GPL excludes you from large sections of the economy and thus carries a cost not everyone can afford. In turn companies frequently use the GPL for "open source washing" via public/private licensing.
In the 90s I used to hear a lot of people joking that the GPL view on open source is communism. After having shifted politically to the left I now think that joke is actually truer than most people realise. And the incompatibility of a communist "gift economy" (i.e. take what you need, give what you can) with the capitalist host system lies at the core of most of the problems we see with open source sustainability.
In other words: open source "economics" (voluntary mutual exchange with no strings attached) is entirely alien to capitalism because in capitalism this behavior is essentially economic suicide except for a few scenarios (e.g. general marketing like Google, onboarding and recruiting like Facebook or promoting commercial services like Microsoft). Much like how CJ characterised npm Inc in her JSConf EU talk, these companies aren't walking all over open source authors because they're evil, they're doing it because they have no useful way to interact with them except for marketing.
Your piece reads mostly like it's trying to get employees to force their employers to support open source via the usual means of labor struggle (i.e. threatening to withhold their labor, shame them so others withhold their labor) but that to me looks more like a band-aid.
They're producing immense value but other people monetise that value while they're barely receiving any meaningful compensation if at all.
It comes more easily if you accept the definition that working as an employee is inherently exploitative as you need to produce more value than you are paid in wages for your employment to be profitable to the employer (who ideally profits so much from the difference that they are compensated for the economical risk they carry and their initial investment, i.e. capital).
Certainly calling it exploitation carries a value judgement but objectively this is how open source works: in a capitalist system, most labor is exploited and because it's largely uncompensated open source is being particularly exploited.