> But no one owes him anything.
I think the disagreement here will continue indefinitely because it is a question of (personal and professional) ethics. Ethics doesn't necessarily offer easy answers, just sometimes hard questions. In every discussion like this on HN you see the direct conflict of several competing Ethical Frameworks that people choose to live by which is why the discussion will likely always recur and it will always seem like two or more teams talking past each other.
"What do we owe to each other?" is a massive, hard ethical question. It's not just an easy economic question with an answer of "well he did the work for free, so obviously it is priced at free" though many ethical frameworks, especially on HN, happily stop there. Some ethical frameworks, on the other hand, don't believe there is any such thing as "free labor", just "exploited labor" and find guilt in every bit of open source usage, expect some amount "owed" in backpay to eventually pay back. Some of those same ethical frameworks still feel that "open source" is an ideal, a community good, but also think that for the health of the community as a whole, some support needs to be given to individuals in that community when/where/as they need it, for the good of the whole, and that both things can be true: "open source creates good software" and "open source sometimes creates the conditions to exploit labor (and we owe it to ourselves to mitigate that)".
I can't tell anyone what their ethical framework should be, just that this discussion will likely remain an impasse because it is about personal and professional ethics. How much I feel that I owe the most exploited of the workers in our industry, is something that keeps me up at night sometimes, and that guilt doesn't come from "nowhere" and I'm well aware of the economics and the license agreements in play: that guilt comes from the ethical frameworks that I hold dear and am unlikely to waver on.