For examples of exploitation, look at the major cloud providers, like AWS, who has been accused of “strip-mining open source for profit”.

Vulture Capitalism

Several larger businesses wait for open source projects to become popular. In other words, they treat OSS like their own personal R&D departments. When a project has a large enough market, they swoop in like vultures, capitalizing on the popularity established by someone else. There’s nothing illegal about this, but some people would argue it exploits the efforts of the creators.

Underpayment

New business models and sponsorship are supposed to be answers for the monetization problem, but the numbers don’t support such claims… not yet anyway.

The point here is the value OSS provides is not commensurate with the compensation it receives. Some would argue this is an exploit of the creators efforts.

Free Support Demands

Popular open source projects often receive support requests, pull requests, and other contributions specific to a particular business need. Open source maintainers typically attempt to serve as many people as they can, but there are people who get downright angry if you don’t accept their contribution or support them… they often plea “but this is for my work!”. They feel it’s OK to ask maintainers to do work for free so they can get paid. Of course, maintainers aren’t forced to do anything, but some people are pretty vindictive. They’ll badmouth a project simply because they didn’t get what they need for free.

The point is maintainers sometimes experience a sense of blackmail over “negative press” or public retaliation for failure to support. I don’t think many companies are actively teaching developers to use their affiliation with a recognized brand/company to get what they want, but many don’t do anything to prevent it. Most aren’t even aware it happens (but it does).

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These are just a few of the ways people view OSS as being exploited.