" I decided to try a crowd-sourced campaign to help with the open sourcing effort. Precisely zero of the companies that have been begging me to open-source the code have contributed in any capacity." Wow, that speaks volumes. Good call on not open sourcing your code.
I think the same goes for those trying to pressure twitpic's owners to give up all of the company's IP for $15k in bandwidth bills. If it's really an indispensable historical archive, as they claim, surely someone is willing to put up some dough and see that twitpic is fairly compensated for relinquishing control of that archive. This goes double now that Twitter is a public company. The fact of the matter is that tw…
So twitpic might be different, but I agree with the general point: if you care so much and you are making money with it, pay, otherwise go build it yourself.