Very interesting and I hope this leads to actual recompense/compensation for people "thanklessly maintaining" OSS. Not sure how it possibly fits into Google's newfound profit-at-all-costs motive, but the gesture is an important first step towards some semblance of justice.
Can you elaborate more on the claimed "profit-at-all-costs" statement? It's been established that the purpose of most corporations are for profit, but iirc most large enterprises have a rather robust ethics framework when working with the OSS community.
I wish I had reasonable evidence to point to, but I'm not really an insider. Mainly, I think of the numerous applications Google invested lots of engineer time into to create an experience, say Hangouts, only to realize that it hampered sales in another corner of Google, say cell plans, and so one project must be discarded for profits in the other. The functionality is often difficult to replace for the end-user, and weakens the overall allure of the Google network/ecosystem of applications in favor of a bottom-line.