> developers of free-ish as in freedom products OWE it, not only to themselves, but their community to be as profitable as possible
Wikipedia seems to do just fine without.
Commercializing a product is a whole other field, and it's not reasonable to expect everyone to be good at that, and not reasonable to expect developers to all take on a second job of commercializing their hobby projects.
Why don't YOU commercialize your fork of their service, and use the proceeds to hire developers to maintain the code? That would be infinitely more useful than armchair criticism of others.
> Wikipedia seems to do just fine without.
No, they still pay fair wage, and I would trust it more if it pays fair wage to people spending their time on the project(including the creator).