eggJuggler

I live in Berlin. I don’t own a car. I can tell you public transport is not great

I don’t think (and also wouldn’t want) that this should be solved by the legal system. It would mean open source developers would have to deal with the whole legal side and implement telemetry into software which largely goes against the idea of many open source projects. How else would you be able to know that a company used your software?

I 100% agree with you and at the same time it’s important to remember that a lot of FOSS software is written by individuals as hobby projects. Implementing features, keeping everything up to date and secure, documentation and testing takes time, effort and skill.
Most people need money to survive so they have a full time job and can only dedicated very limited resources to these projects.
Too many people got used to free services that “just work” and forgot that they are the product now. If you don’t want that look for alternatives that charge (even then you might still be the product) or better yet donate to open source projects in the hopes they will one day be on-par with their closed alternatives (there’s examples where this worked). Until we have a UBI and people have the time to dedicate themselves to a cool project this is the only way.

I think it would be even better if companies and governments started shifting funds back to these projects when they switch from commercial to FOSS software (which is happening more recently) but most just happily pocket the savings and this will not change until a fundamental cultural shift happens