alt Hacker News>"Commercial" implies to extract the most out of every potential customer
Disagree, this is an unreasonable framing. We just need to exchange goods/services for money, not optimize every transaction on a curve by some measure of "extract everything"
There are many incentives apart from $ -- general fame, specific, niche credibility, love of the thing, internal projects (eg a phd/masters/capstone project), etc. Looking at everything from a $-incentive only will lead you to actions and incentives that don't make any sense. Look at the linux kernel or something like sqlite -- more deployed than almost any piece of "commercial" closed-source software, huge community, signifigant resources, but tiny, tiny slice of revenue by any metric of popularity.
That's not an unreasonable "framing", it's an unreasonable expectation to believe a "market" to optimize for the interests of those exploited for profit.
In other words, you want the market to restrain itself, which of course never works.
You then observe people to have other motivations beyond greed. Yes! I emphatically agree. Only, those aren't subject to market logic other than being potential subjects of exploitation.