The thing to remember is that behind every meme is a person. Someone spent time and effort to make a funny image or story, and they probably never got paid for it. Then someone comes along and tries to make money off of it: how would you feel?
And who actually makes money from meme's anyway? Is YouTube scum for making money from showing video memes? Likewise for 4chan (the website, not the community) and Reddit? The advertisers that buy ads on those pages? What about memegenerators?
The obvious answer is that the content being discussed isn't really a meme. They are copyrighted images. The idea of a "Troll Face" can be a meme, surely, but the specific image of a trollface that is widely recognized was obviously copyrighted. If you don't like that then create your own image and release it with a more permissive license like Public Domain.
Every site mentioned helps to create new memes and supports the "infrastructure" of motivating other to come up with new memes.
The meme defense projects seems to try capitalizing from just popular memes by making them even more popular. YouTube,4chan,Reddit are like a complex network of indie music clubs. Meme Defender is acting like a major label, that just takes well known "scene" memes and exploiting them towards a non-meme audience. No wonder the "true fans" are screaming sell-out.
What about 'all the things'? It's a frame pulled from a hyperbole and a half comic strip. Are you saying nobody owns that image, just because it's become popular?
That's what his blog says, but if you read the Kickstarter project page, it makes no mention of open source. It says that if you donate $2, you get a free copy of the full version. It also says that some of the Kickstarter money will go towards marketing.
None of this sounds like he planned to make it free or open source at all. It sounds like he is trying to capitalize on intellectual property that he doesn't own the rights to.
I love it when I spend time writing open source software that people use for free. If a business uses it and earns money because of it, I'm even more delighted.
If you choose to put something creative out into the ether, you should have the expectation that if it's good there are going to be copies and other derivations. If you can't stomach this or can't afford legal counsel to enforce your IP, keep your creative works off the Internet.
The world is a better place because of "unsolicited collaboration".
I'd feel honored someone actually thought my output was good enough to try and make money off of, and good luck to them. Maybe I'll start competing since I could probably do a lot better. (Edit: in case my more general point is lost here, that general point is that we shouldn't be basing our policies on feelings.)
